Sunday Summary: 15th of 2014

Happy Sunday!  The day is in the news as a celebrity baby name – again.  And so let’s start our post with Anna’s excellent defense of Sunday as a given name.

Elsewhere online:

• Interesting to see the results of Nomes e mais Nomes site poll on favorite names.  Laura and Miguel came out on top, names that seem to be pretty mainstream.  It matches with my observations about this site’s annual March Madness competition – the more conventional favorites tend to win out.
• E is for Epsilon.  And Evarista, my favorite on this list of ancient Greek possibilities at British Baby Names.
• Surprises from the New South Wales Top 100 for 2013: Indie, Indiana, Piper, Aria, Willow, Zara for girls, and Jasper, Angus, Flynn, Nate, Luca, and Hugo for boys.  Some of those seem specifically Australian – but are any of those likely to be big movers when we see the US data?
• Speaking of data, there’s been all this talk of how boys’ names ending in -n have exploded in recent decades.  To us name nerds, that’s old news.  But what is more interesting to me is the way that some ends in -n names can still feel fresh, even surprising: Sullivan, Stellan, Eben, Soren.  While others, no matter how rare, can feel tired, like Daxton or Raydin – on numbers alone, they’re quite unusual, but they don’t seem terribly distinctive, do they?  The latest Design Mom Living with Kids home tour reminded me of another name that I’d file in the still fresh category: Roan.
• Oh, I love Laura Wattenberg’s observation that a little bit of magic helps an appealing name catch on – see Samantha, Willow, Elena and lots of names in between.
• These names from fourteenth century Italy have me swooning.  There’s even an Altaluna.  And Isotta appeals to me, too, though I think she’s less wearable than some Isabella stand-ins.
• From medieval Italy to the moon and beyond – have you seen this list of out-of-this-world names?  My favorites are Seren and Atlas.
• Proof that kids named for movie characters – even villains – turn out okay.  Or, at least, that two boys called Darth grew up to be contributing members of society.  But – small voice – no, Jacob did not become the #1 name because of Twilight.  Jacob has been the most popular name for boys born in the US since 1999, when actor Taylor Lautner was about seven years old, and was not running around as a shirtless shapeshifter.
• We haven’t stepped into the Wayback Machine lately, have we?  In 2009, the name I profiled was Astrid.  2010 featured Sven.  A very Scandinavian duo, right?  The Baby Name of the Day in 2011 was Darius and 2012 was Lotus.  Which reminds me – we went to see the cherry blossoms today, so I really ought to mention this post on Sakura.  But back to the Wayback for April 2013, when the name in the spotlight was Leif.

That’s all for this week.  As always, thank you for reading – and have a great week!