The lists of top names for boys and girls betray the shifting sands of taste
THE TYRANNY of Jack and Emily continues. For the fifth year in a row, the Central Statistics Office has identified Jack as the most popular name for new babies in Ireland. Emily sneaks past Sophie to take the girls’ title.
If you move in certain circles, the news may come as a surprise. For some years, organic intellectuals have striven to uncover ancient Irish names – previously attached to fairies and two-headed dogs – whose unfeasibly high ratio of vowels to consonants suggest onomatopoeic representations of dying screams in American comic books.
Conversations with new parents in the crush bar of urban theatres began to take on the quality of inquisitions into racial purity. As one struggled pathetically with a name that seemed composed solely to accommodate high-level Scrabble players, one eyed the door nervously for signs of looming culture police. “I’m not a fascist, honest,” one didn’t actually say. “It’s just that I have trouble producing that particular sound when something pink and tender is not trapped painfully in the zip of my fly.”
Anyway, none of the trickier Celtic names has made it into the top five. Indeed, the list is eerily similar to equivalent charts for the United Kingdom. Jack is followed by James (not Séamus). Seán (arguably a cousin of Jack) is then followed by Daniel (not Donal) and the solidly Irish Conor.
The girls’ top five is even more Anglophilic. Reading the list, one imagines the nameplates you’d expect to find set beside the doorbells at a particularly upmarket Knightsbridge apartment building. Emily, Sophie, Emma, Lily, Grace? Let’s all pile into Giles’s motor and make for the country. The first plovers’ eggs should be in from Brideshead. These things tend to go in waves. A name that was once detestably unfashionable will, after most of its wearers have died, take on a quaint quality – a Laura Ashley retro-charm – and be re-adopted by a generation that suddenly finds novelty in the outmoded.
Looking at the girls’ list, I am reminded that my late paternal grandmother was named Grace. In the decades since her death, I cannot remember meeting a single woman with that name. (Please feel free to mail me angrily if I’ve forgotten you.) Now, it seems hundreds of my countrywomen are named for a divinely implanted class of mercy.
For much of the 1990s, nurseries appeared to be populated by budding under-house-parlour maids from the classic television series Upstairs Downstairs. Ruby played with Daisy. Rose frolicked with Lily. Another ancient circle had been completed.
What is going on when parents name their children? Well, the new fathers and mothers are often trying to say something about themselves. Name your child for some unpronounceable Gaelic horse-god and you assert both your great learning and your pride in heritage. Drag out one of those monikers previously attached to Edwardian domestic staff and you look to be celebrating your proud lack of stuffiness. Call your child Magpie Peashooter or Zoltan the Magnificent and you are confirming that you long for the unfortunate tyke to have his or her head pushed down the school lavatory on a daily basis.
How has it taken us so long to get to pop stars and their adventures in name-torture? It is, of course, entirely possible that Fifi Trixibelle Geldof, daughter of Bob, and Moon Unit Zappa, daughter of Frank, are very comfortable with their unusual forenames, but, when saddling children with such handles, the parent is certainly making life easier for potential bullies. The need to express oneself should not overpower the responsibility to keep your little one safe from super-wedgies and Chinese burns.
If you like John Updike, then call your son John, not Updike. Take the latter option – as an acquaintance of an acquaintance did – and you damn the boy to decades of furrowed brows as new friends try to make sense of syllables that don’t belong at the front end of a nameplate.
We should also consider the worrisome expectations that a particular name can inflict upon its bearer. It just wouldn’t seem right for somebody named Cedric to move about the place without a monocle. If you’re called Zac (or Zach or Zak) then you had better wear skin-tight jeans and geek-chic spectacles. Nobody called Nigel ever became a lumberjack.
Donald is a bearable handle. True, holders of that name do, as children, have to endure “quacks” from contemporaries and, from older relatives, inquiries as to the whereabouts of their “troosers”. I get called “Donal” about twice a week. These are acceptable inconveniences. Yes, on balance, I think I can cope with being named after some New Zealand rugby player who was actually called Don Clarke. Mind you, I can’t even watch that sport without feeling slightly nauseous.
So, don’t expect young Ibsen to become a playwright or little Fonteyn to become a ballerina. Actually, best just call them Jack and Emily. There’s no point trying to be clever.