The days when the Myrtles were young

A reader pointed me to this commentary from NPR's "All Things Considered" on "names with backbone." The commentator begins by noting an odd phenomenon. Reading the obituaries he sees the same names "over and over again," names like Opal, Ethel and Hazel. He describes those names as an entire generation like "The Boy Named Sue" -- parents choosing unstylish names in order to toughen up their kids. In parallel, he suggests that baby boomers who gave their kids stylish names were coddling them. Here's an excerpt:

"There was a time when moms and dads didn't worry about whether their children were popular. They were more concerned about whether their kids had enough to eat. Parents wanted sturdy, rugged children so they gave them sturdy, rugged names. But as times got better, parenting had less to do with feeding children and more to do with nurturing their self esteem."

Names like Opal and Hazel will come back, he claims, "when we decide we've spent too much time sheltering our children, and we want them to grow up resilient and ready to fend for themselves, just like the boy name Sue."

At this point you might stop to wonder: how could an entire generation have be given the same unpopular names, "over and over again"?

Fashion is a subtle, pervasive force that shapes our impressions of the world. The commentator, who like most of us lives in the present, hears names like Opal as sturdy and unfashionable. He hears this so surely and vividly that he applies it to the motivations of parents 100 years ago. They chose names that sound sturdy and rugged, thus they wanted their children to lead sturdy, rugged lives. Right?

Travel back in time with me for an exercise of the imagination: let's try to hear Opal as the parents of a century ago heard it.

In the 1880s America was a largely agricultural country, and names like Mary and Margaret, John and George still dominated America's nurseries. But a new wind was blowing. Cities were growing, waves of immigration were transforming the country, and a new generation of names grew with it. From 1890 to 1920, as modern America was born, the new names parents chose were paved with gold.

For boys, parents chose glittering dreams of aristocracy. Alongside John and George, we saw boys named with the surnames of the upper crust -- Milton, Sidney, Whitney. Germanic names were also popular for both sexes, their dense continental sound as rich as velvet. And for girls we had names like jewels, delicate symbols of nature's beauty. The botanicals: Lily, Rose, Hazel, Myrtle. The gems: Amber, Ruby, Jewel, Opal. They were an gossamer vision of femininity, ready to be put on a pedestal. Talk about "nurturing their self esteem." Just hear the grandparents of the time grumbling: "Opal? What kind of fancy-pants name is that?"

Back to the present now. Can you imagine saying that parents chose names like Amber, Lily and Jewel because they wanted their daughters to be "sturdy"? Yet the only thing that separates those names from Opal, Hazel and Myrtle is our 21st-century fashion sense. In reality, all those names were wildly trendy creations that zoomed into style and then zoomed back out again -- the Tiffanys of the 1900s.

It's a peculiar conceit, imagining that the past was immune to fashion. It fits with much of America's mythology, an image of a rough-hewn, no-nonsense land built with our own hands. But there's another American mythology that fits better when talking about name trends: the land of opportunity. Names like Opal weren't sturdy and rugged, they were they stuff dreams are made of. And every generation bestows its dreams on its children in the form of names

The Baby Name Wizard