They just released the 2020 list of B.C.’s most popular baby names.
Number one? Olivia. No surprise there. Olivia was the first choice in 2019, too, and has hovered near the top for eight of the past nine years, the Connor McDavid of the baby scoring race.
Similarly, the rest of 2020’s Top 10 — Liam, Oliver, Noah, Lucas, Emma, Theodore, Benjamin, Ethan and Charlotte — were almost identical to 2019’s. The names were just shuffled around a bit, like Doug Ford’s cabinet after a St. Bart’s sunburn scandal.
You know who was missing from the baby list? Karen.
Jeez, Karens used to be everywhere, just like K-cars, Radio Shacks and curling rink ashtrays. Every workplace had at least three of them, plus a spare that they kept in the back in case one of the others broke down. Fifty years ago, 426 babies were called Karen, according to B.C.’s Vital Statistics Agency. Last year? Two. For real. Out of the 39,322 babies born between Jan. 1 and Dec. 17, just two were named Karen.
OK, 2020 was lousy for everybody, but for people named Karen it was like being served a side of dung with your manure sandwich. One moment they were just trying to make it to wine o’clock like the other moms, and the next thing they knew their name had, thanks to social media memes, become synonymous with nasty, racist, middle-class entitlement. So, yeah, calling a baby Karen in 2020 was like naming one Adolf after 1945.
Or maybe that cause-and-effect conclusion is wrong. It’s not as though the drop-off was sudden. Karen hasn’t been a popular choice for years. Ditto for Susan, Jennifer and Debbie, which in the olden days were the only other girls’ names in use. It might have been a bylaw or something.
Same went for the boys, 97.6 per cent of whom were named Robert. Really, there were so many — at least nine in every 1970s school photo — that they had to be divided into Robs, Bobs and other variants to tell them apart.
I have mentioned this ubiquity before: Roberts De Niro, Duvall and Redford all won Oscars.
On TV, Bob Denver was Gilligan, Rob Reiner was in All In The Family, and Bob Newhart starred in the imaginatively titled Bob Newhart Show. The radio played Bob Dylan, backed by Robbie Robertson and The Band. Bobby Kennedy got shot.
At one time, all hockey players were called Bobby: Orr, Hull, Clarke, Nystrom, Baun, Schmautz, Smith. No more. Of the 970 players who skated in the NHL last season, just one, Bobby Ryan, went by that name. That mirrors the overall decline, with the number of Roberts born in B.C. falling steadily from 845 in 1950 to just 31 in 2019.
These changes aren’t just down to the ebb and flow of popularity, of names drifting in and out of fashion. Rather, they reflect an attempt to avoid popularity altogether. Where yesterday’s parents used to fish out of a small pool (though few went to the extreme of the boxer George Foreman, who christened each of his five sons George) today’s are more likely to look to the ocean.
A San Diego State University researcher found this trend took off in the 1990s. In 1955, a third of all U.S. baby boys had names plucked from the 10 Most Popular list, but by 2007 that had fallen to nine per cent. For girls, it went from 22 per cent to eight. (The research took into account changes in immigration and ethnicity.)
A 2017 story in the publication Quartz quoted Laura Wattenberg, founder of the baby-naming site Baby Name Wizard: “I think in past generations, parents were much more concerned about their kids’ names fitting in. But in the past 20 years, the focus has been 100 per cent on standing out. Parents are really, really worried about their kids being ordinary.”
For whatever reason, even the most commonly chosen names are not really that common. (At number one on the list, there were only 263 Olivias in B.C. in 2019.) Instead, what we see is a huge diversity of Auroras, Elowens, Everlees, Brantleys, Ayden/Kayden/Kaden/Kaiden/Kaysons and Jax/Jaxen/Jaxon/Jaxson/Jaxtons – all of whose parents love them just as much as their grandparents loved their Susans and Bobs (though I have to wonder what was going on with the people who named my cousin’s friend, Duane Pipe.)
Welcome to the world, Olivia, Liam, Karen and Colette. Born in a troubled year, may you have a wonderful life.
jknox@timescolonist.com
