You’ve probably noticed that between about Dec. 20 and Jan. 2, media outlets run a lot of stories about winter driving tips, the “busiest day of the year” at the local airport (and for us, on BC Ferries), the current cost of giving all the gifts in the Twelve Days of Christmas, how to keep those gifts from being stolen from your car in the mall parking lot, etc.
My favourite winter holiday filler is – teeny, wrinkled hands down – the annual list of most popular baby names.
I don’t have children, so I’ve never been faced with the naming conundrum, but I’m always ready to weigh in on kitchen table debates about the baby name list.
They called him what?!? And when did Bertha stop being a popular girl’s name? (Looks like about 50 years ago, at least here in B.C.)
On the surface, the baby name ranking is fluff that can fill some column inches or burn up a few minutes of TV time on a slow news day, but it’s also a snapshot of our changing demographics and popular culture.
Our health ministry knows how fascinating this is. They’ve got an online tool that allows you to track the popularity of most any name over the last 100 years: www.health.gov.bc.ca/vs/babynames
The Kids in the Hall classic, “These are the Daves I Know,” was the unofficial rallying cry of my university in the late ’80s. There were a lot of Daves on campus. No one was more than one degree of separation from at least a brace of Daves. No wonder – the peak for Dave/David births was in about 1960.
There was a spike in boys being named Henrik in B.C. in 2011. I’ll let you figure out the possible reason.
The rise of the Masons started in 1985, which was the first year more than five babies were given that name in B.C. Girls named Acacia have been appearing in waves since about 1993.
Heading into the final few days of 2017, Benjamin was the top boy’s name and Olivia was the number one choice for girls.
Sean, it seems, has been in steady decline for more than two decades. There were just 19 Seans born in 2016, which made a late surge to topple Benjamin this year unlikely.
The other holiday filler that fascinates me is the Christmas and New Year messages from the likes of the premier, prime minister, the Queen and her various vice-regals.
North Korea’s Kim Jong Un aside, they aren’t usually very newsworthy. This year, just for fun, I threw the New Year messages from Premier John Horgan, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Gov.-Gen. Julie Payette and Lt.-Gov. Judith Guichon into a word cloud generator. After you eliminate words like new, year, Canada and Canadians, one of the biggest words was work, as in: “We will be working hard.” “Let’s work together.” “We still have a lot of hard work left to do.” “We have our work cut out.”
Guess I better stop exploring historical baby name data and get back to work – 2018 is calling.
