The name shame

WASHINGTON,DC: From time to time I rant ineffectually against what I feel is a growing tendency of Americans to give their newborns idiot names. It’s probably getting tiresome, and I was fully prepared to swear off this addiction forever until, like a schoolyard dope peddler, the Social Security Administration dragged me back in by publishing some juicy advanced baby-name metrics. Tie me off, bro.

We now have the following statistic, which may sound boring but turns out to be my Smoking Gun: the percentage of all new baby names in each year that are among the 1,000 most popular names for that year. The Social Security site presents this list without analysis, but I can help: This figure compares the number of names being given out each year that are at least relatively common with the number of stupid ones that are of such unusual construction or spelling they’re almost unheard of. As I suspected, this percentage has been generally dropping year after year, as more and more parents are opting for names like “Kamron” or “Aleigha” or “Juelz” or “Krish,” all of which belong in that growing outlier group.