Names: My newspaper column: now presenting an ancient Greek nymph and recent anachronistic TV aristocrat

[Ormond]

Here's today's column, my annual report on The American Name Society's Name of the Year vote:

https://omaha.com/life-entertainment/local/barbie-gaza-chosen-as-joint-names-of-the-year-in-2023/article_408f8ea2-b00e-11ee-bdee-87e76b6a4167.html

[Tears of Lys]

Thanks, @Ormond !  Your articles are always interesting reads.

Are the ANS's selections based on frequency of newborns being given those names, or a popular vote by members of the society?  I would think the latter, but you never know.

[Ormond]

By a vote of members of the society -- if you read the article you will see that this is a vote on names which are significant in terms of culture and/or onomastics during the past year, and only one of the subcategories (Personal Names) could possibly have a "recently popular baby name" as the winner.  

[Ormond]

Here is the link to today's column:

https://omaha.com/life-entertainment/local/cleveland-evans-lord-of-the-rings-actor-raises-elijahs-popularity/article_efe70d58-ba1d-11ee-b325-cbb7f61263fc.html

Recently popularity figures found on behindthename.com show that the huge recent popularity of Elijah in the United States has started to lead to increased usage in other English-speaking countries and even France. 

[Ormond]

Here is the link to today's column:

https://omaha.com/life-entertainment/cleveland-evans-brandys-fame-hasnt-translated-to-names-popularity/article_d7bdad1a-c68c-11ee-84eb-5bbbeba953ac.html

I didn't realize before researching this just how "American" the name Brandy is. It doesn't seem to have reached anwywhere near the level of usage in the UK, Australia, or even Canada that it achieved in the USA during the 1980s and 1990s.

Edited February 11 by Ormond
incorrect link

[Ormond]

Here is the link to today's column:

https://omaha.com/life-entertainment/local/cleveland-evans-sean-has-roots-in-irish-ancestry/article_6e36f098-d10b-11ee-a07c-9fc2d77585fc.html

Here I was quite surprised by just how recent the use of Sean in official records in the USA is. When I wrote my column on Iann a while back, I found that Ian really was not used as an official name in an English-speaking context until 1858, with it being automatically translated to "John" otherwise. With Sean, it looks like it was not used in an English speaking context until the late 19th century in Ireland, and wasn't used in the USA until the 1920s! I know I have read many fiction pieces and seen many examples in film and TV of men of Irish descent called Sean in the 19th century or even the 18th century. It turns out that if the characters are not supposedly in an Irish Gaelic speaking context, this is an anachromism, and any man called Sean when people were speaking the Irish language would probably automatically have been called JOhn when people were speaking English before around 1890.

[snowleo]

We gave Edric the middle name "Sean" precisely in acknowledgement of his Irish ancestry. And my daughter got "Erin" for the same reason (well, that, and because it's also my middle name!)

 

  

[Ormond]

Here is the link to today's column:

https://omaha.com/life-entertainment/local/cleveland-evans-jasmine-blooms-in-popularity-thanks-to-aladdin-and-other-shows/article_91fce044-dca7-11ee-9ac9-b3bedd5ee54e.html

I think the most incredible coincidence in all the research I've done for my column is that the first sure example of a Jasmine I found in the United States census was a woman born as Jasmine Whitley in MIssissippi, and the character who most popularized the name was a "Southern belle" type named Whitley and played by the actress Jasmine Guy. Jasmine Whitley MacMahon, who as I mentioned in the column spent most of her married life in Laredo, Texas and is buried there. I have linked to her headstone at the "Find A Grave" site. As far as I can tell she was just an "everyday citizen" and I don't see how the producers of the TV show "A Different World" could have possibly heard of her.

https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/50244505/jasmine-macmahon

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

Thought you might enjoy this:

Irish names you’re probably saying wrong and how to pronounce them | CNN

[Ormond]

20 hours ago, Mr. Chatywin et al. said:

Thought you might enjoy this:

Irish names you’re probably saying wrong and how to pronounce them | CNN

Thanks! That's a particularly great article because it doesn't oversimplify and points out that different regions of Ireland have different dialects in the pronunciation of the Irish language which means there are different ways some of these names can be pronounced.  And of course that famous people have an effect -- I love their information that Saoirse Ronan pronounces her first name to rhyme with "inertia", and that before she was famous this was actually the least common of three possible pronounciations in Ireland (the others being "Sorsha" and "Seersha"), but that her fame has now meant the "inertia" rhyme is taking over everywhere in Ireland. 

[Ormond]

Here is the link to today's column:

https://omaha.com/life-entertainment/local/cleveland-evans-shakespeare-is-the-author-of-the-name-jessica/article_a4c40d54-e712-11ee-bad4-1b98c7a4e7e5.html

There wasn't enough space to give Grant Smith's full argument about his belief that Jessica was created from the falconry term "jess". He believes that in the play Shylock refers in a punning way to his servant Launcelot (who also runs away) as a "haggard", which was a term for a wild or unmanageable hawk. Smith notes that hunting falcons or hawks were ususually female, and says the -ica ending of Jessica is the same Latin suffix found in words like Judaic and erotica, indicating "collective information about a subject", so that Jessica's name would mean "information about jesses" to someone who knew Latin grammar -- as Shakespeare probably did, as part of normal schooling in England in his day was learning Latin and having drills in its grammar.Personally I am not convinced Shakespeare was ONLY thinking about jesses when he created the name. However, it is certainly true that his audience would have been much more familiar with falconry and with the word "jess" than modern audiences are, and surely he would have known many of the viewers of the play in his day would make an association between the name Jessica and the word "jesses". I think it is part of Shakespeare's brilliance that he was able to come up with a name for the character with combines Jewish, Italian, and falconry associations to make a completely appropriate name for her.

And I was certainly surprised that the first Jessicas who were born in the USA in the early 19th century were Jewish. I suppose the fact that Shylock and Jessica were some of the very few Jewish characters educated people would have know at the time overcame the fact that Shakespeare's Jessica converts to Christianity to run off with her lover.

[Ormond]

I got so busy yesterday I forgot to post the link to my column:

https://omaha.com/life-entertainment/local/cleveland-evans-russell-is-a-surname-that-became-a-common-first-name/article_393d2bd0-f2af-11ee-b562-07d76feb49a8.html

One of the interesting differences in naming between the UK and USA is how in the former people called "Rusty" and "Ginger" are normally thought to have the nickname because they have red hair, while until very recently in the USA these were primarily thought of as pet forms for Russell and Virginia, respectively. "Ginger" as a term for "redhead" in particular is a Britishism which has only started being used in the USA in the last few decades. The famous American actress Ginger Rogers was born as a Virginia and did not have red hair.

[Ormond]

Here is the link to today's column:

https://omaha.com/life-entertainment/local/cleveland-evans-daphnes-meaning-goes-back-to-the-greeks/article_7cdc1b38-fd06-11ee-b7ff-3fb07be04e7e.html

This was one of the most fun names to research. Though I certainly knew about slaveowners giving "Classical" Roman and Greek names to slaves, Daphne hadn't been one that I thought of as being heavily used that way until I research the name in USA census records. It was quite a surprise to see that there were two free Black families in Talbot County, Maryland headed by women named Daphne in 1800.

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It was interesting to see how the name seems to have been used for slaves in the USA before I could find evidence that it was ever used in Britain. Charlotte Yonge, one of the very first authors of a book on the history of names, said this about Daphne in the first edition of her book in 1863: "Daphne has not subsequently been used as a name except for dogs" (the "subsequently" referring to the original Greek myth!

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Though Daphne has a stereotype as an aristocratic English name, the first Daphnes in the 18th century in England were definitely NOT upper-class. As I mention in the column, Daphne Crossley, the second earliest Daphne I could find in the UK census, was listed as a "power loom weaver" in 1851. What I didn't have room to mention in the column was that she had two brothers and a sister who were also listed as "power loom weavers" that year. Their widowed mother Daphne Douglas Crossley never has an occupation listed in the census. By the way, her maiden name isn't in the census -- the reason I know it was Douglas is that she had a son whose first name was Douglas who emigrated to Massachusetts, and on his death certificate in Massachusetts it says his mother's maiden name was Douglas. Ancestry.com is putting a lot of links to other records in its census data, which helps one find such things out! It would be great if we could find out who the first Douglas's parents were back in Edinburgh, Scotland and why they gave her that name, but that information may well be completely lost.

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The first aristocratic Daphne in England, as the column states, was Daphne De La Poer Beresford (1854-1941), a great-great-granddaughter of the first Earl of Tyrone. Her great-grandfather was a member of Parliament, while her own father was an army officer, which seems to be a career at lot of younger sons in noble families of Britain went into. Interestingly, this first aristocratic Daphne never married. The name rather suddenly starts turning up in the 1880s in multiple wealthy and upper middle class families in England, which is where it developed its modern "British upper class" stereotype. But there just wouldn't have been noticeable adult Daphnes among the British aristocracy until the start of the 20th century. So the character in "Bridgerton" is an anachronism, as are any other instances of fictional aristocratic Daphnes before 1854. Julia Quinn, the American author of the novels the TV series is based on, was simply guilty of projecting the name and its stereotype back into a past where it really did not exist.

Finally, I know in terms of TV characters that many Americans are going to first think of Daphne Moon, the character on the sitcom "Frasier" played by Jane Leeves, or Daphne Blake, the character in the "Scooby-Doo" animated universe. But I didn't have room to mention them, because they just didn't have the impact on baby names that the Daphnes from "Surfside 6" and "Bridgerton" did.