Do you think you have chosen a unique baby name? You probably haven’t. In this fascinating essay, Daniel Wolfe explains how the baby names people choose follow trends—even when we don’t realize it.
Nowadays, she said, people not only have access to unlimited cable channels and the internet, but those innovations have helped usher in a “username creation” mentality — meaning that if someone else has the same name, it’s viewed as taken. So parents tend to tweak their baby’s name just a bit — keeping the “-son,” for example, while swapping the “Ja-” for “Car-.”
Wattenberg finds “an incredible irony” in this. People think they’re choosing something totally unique, but they do it in a way that winds up moving with the zeitgeist. As a result, names have actually gotten less distinctive over time, with nearly half of all baby names now following identifiable suffix trends — a phenomenon Wattenberg calls “lockstep individualism.”
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