Stop stealing our names!

Freditor's note: The brief essay below was written for my old, defunct blog, in discussion of a matter of national interest -- the constant swiping of boys' names for girls, which immediately and irrevocably turns them into girls' names forever. I thought I had rerun this piece before and wanted to link to it in regard to another topic, and was shocked to see that I had not. Well, here it is, with a little updating. We'll address the other topic on Tuesday.

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I guess it's a class thing. Poor folks seem to like to make up weird names for their children, like Nevaeh ("It's heaven backward!" Which would be...hell?). I can appreciate the idea; every child is precious and unique, so why not a unique name? Etc. Okay, I would not do that, and I am very glad my parents did not do that, but point taken.

The normal names seem to hit the middle class. Johns, Marys, Roberts, Jerrys, Jills, Lauras, Freds (!), Marions, names with a solid track record tend to come from the solid middle class.

Then there are the upper classes--think Park Slope and up. These folks have some odd notions of names. This is nothing new. They like to use last names as first names (Madison, Murphy, ) or places (Brooklyn, London) or ancient Biblical or just out-of-date names (Zeke, Agatha). I guess it works out okay -- if your first name is O'Hara, are you in danger of being picked on by little Methuselah and Throgs Neck? You can all suffer together.

But one thing I object to is the blatant thievery of moms stealing men's names for baby girls. We lost Tracy, Leslie, Lindsay, and Morgan some time ago. We're losing Jordan, Drew, Dylan, Cameron, Brett, Alex, Gray, Ellery, Jesse, Parker, Schuyler, and others now. Many are not stolen by outright theft, but by taking a girl's name and shortening it to the boy's name (like Alex, Bobby, Micky, George, Sam, even Fred!).

Nameberry lists a bunch of unisex names, noting that "Most unisex names lean at least slightly towards one gender or the other". But in fact, once a name has leaned toward the girl side, it's dead as a boy's name. Even in these modern times, no person with any regard for the opinion of anyone else names a boy Sue.

So stop stealing our names! (We still have James, but he may be going fast....) Goodness knows they're stealing everything else from boys.