{"id":10178,"date":"2014-07-25T07:29:21","date_gmt":"2014-07-25T11:29:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=10178"},"modified":"2015-01-21T09:14:48","modified_gmt":"2015-01-21T13:14:48","slug":"baby-name-to-discuss-declan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2014\/07\/25\/baby-name-to-discuss-declan\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Name to Discuss: Declan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Swistle,<\/p>\n

I am an avid reader of your blog and have always fantasized about naming my children. The time is finally here, and I am due with my first in January! My name is Anne, DH is Dave, and our last name is Heal(e)d,pronounced as in what a doctor does to you. We have had our boy name picked out forever but are struggling with girl names. I have a list a mile long and DH doesn’t do much adding or subtracting to it. Some of my top girl names right now are :
\nVivienne,
\nCharlotte,
\nMadeline,
\nSophia,
\nAriana,
\nMaeve, and
\nMargaret (I know Margaret is an outlier but it is after my mom — still trying to convince DH that Maggie Heal(e)d is an adorable name for a little girl!)
\nMiddle name for girl will be a family name — Anne, Grace, Mary, or Rose.
\nHowever the problem now is that our boy name was #2 on nameberry’s most searched names of 2014 — Declan! Should I be worried? Is Declan about to become the next Aiden? Will my child be Declan H in class? Or am I overthinking this and we should just go with the name we loved first?
\nMiddle name for boy will be Sullivan after DH’s middle. Other boy names we like include Nolan, Ronan, Benjamin, and Alexander.<\/p>\n

So in short — should I be worried about Declan? Also, help with a girl name would be so much appreciated!<\/p>\n

Thank you,
\nAnne<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

When I received your letter, I assumed I wouldn’t be answering it: I can only guess at the future popularity of a name, and Declan doesn’t seem worrisome to me, so it wouldn’t have been much of a post: “No, I don’t think it’s a problem, but of course I can’t know for sure. Love, Swistle”<\/p>\n

However, in the last week and a half I’ve received TWO MORE letters worrying about the future popularity of the name Declan, so all right, let’s discuss it—with the caveat that I didn’t know AIDEN was going to be the next Aiden.<\/p>\n

Here is the thing with a “most searched” list: it definitely tells us which names are generating a lot of INTEREST, but that doesn’t mean parents are going to USE them. I look up a lot of names just out of curiosity (“I wonder how popular this name is?,” “I wonder why I’m suddenly hearing this name everywhere?”), and I’ll bet a lot of other people do too.<\/p>\n

I remember awhile back when it seemed like EVERYONE was talking about and asking about the name Juniper. I thought to myself, “Wow, there is a LOT of interest in this name! And it sounds a little like Jennifer, which was so popular! I’ll bet it’s going to go RACING up the charts!”<\/p>\n

\"(screen

(screen shot from SSA.gov)<\/p><\/div>\n

And I mean, if parents wanted to use it because it was absolutely unique and they’d never heard it before, I WOULD still point out that increased interest in the name seems to have resulted in increased usage. But we’re not talking about an overnight sensation with several Junipers per classroom: we’re talking about a formerly almost-totally-unused name that is now being used a little bit. There was a LOT of interest in it when people first started hearing it, but that didn’t lead to a LOT of people using it—just a FEW.<\/p>\n

The name Declan is getting some attention lately, and I would not be surprised if that led to increased usage. One of the major reasons it kept getting crossed off my own baby name list was the difficulty of pronunciation, so the increased familiarity of the name would be a huge plus for me. But if you’re looking for something highly unusual, it’s true that ship has sailed:<\/p>\n

\"(screen

(screen shot from SSA.gov)<\/p><\/div>\n

That’s a nice respectable rise to fashion: 16 years from the first year it hit the Top 1000 until now, and it STILL isn’t in the Top 100. But I’d expect to see it there, maybe as early as the 2014 chart. Again, for me this would be GOOD news: I like to use names that people recognize and can pronounce, not names that result in startled or confused expressions. But if your tastes run more towards startled\/confused, I don’t think Declan is the way to go.<\/p>\n

But looking at your lists, I don’t think your tastes DO run toward startled\/confused. Sophia is the #1 most popular name for baby girls right now, and Charlotte is #11. Madeline is one of those stealth names that’s challenging to even compute the popularity for, because of the many, many ways to spell it—but it’s up there. Vivienne\/Vivian is similar to Declan, I’d say: TONS of attention that resulted in a nice rise to familiarity and ease of use without becoming the next Isabella.<\/p>\n

Or perhaps Charlotte will turn out to have been a better comparison with Declan: lots of attention that looks like it will indeed result in a top-ten name. It’s very hard to know whether a name will come into fashion in the “nicely into the Top 100 but not so popular people get tired of it” way, or whether it will head right for the Top 10. I FEEL as if Declan won’t make it to #1, but I felt the same about Noah and look where we are with that.<\/p>\n

One thing to ask yourselves is how terrible would it be if a child DID some years have to use a surname initial. I do think that would be tiresome if it were Every Single Classroom All Through School, but that doesn’t happen so much anymore: even Noah and Sophia are given to only about 1% of new babies, which gives us a national average of one Noah or one Sophia per 6 or 7 classrooms (assuming about 30 kids per classroom, about half girls and half boys). Some years a Noah or Sophia WOULD probably have to go by Noah H. or Sophia H., or perhaps they could go by their first and middle if they liked that better. But is that fate so terrible that we must avoid it at all costs, or is that the kind of thing most people can handle without undue distress? I had another Kristen in my classroom one year, and one of us just went by a nickname that year. I can see how someone whose name was used 8 times as often (that’s the approximate difference between the popularity of the name Kristen\/Kristin and the popularity of the name Jennifer) would have a lingering fear of classroom duplication, but names aren’t used with that frequency now. At its peak, Jennifer was used for over 4% of baby girls—FOUR TIMES the current usage of today’s top names.<\/p>\n

Another issue is that even Aiden was not the next Aiden: one reason its popularity feels so out of hand is that it belonged to a group of names that included Caden, Hayden, Jayden, Braden, etc. That GROUP got so popular, it caught the interest even of people who aren’t interested in names. Declan doesn’t belong to any such group: even if it reached #1, it wouldn’t FEEL as popular as Aiden did at its peak of #9.<\/p>\n

And what if it didn’t even get there? Imagine if it rose to a very respectable “not too common and yet not too out-there” ranking of somewhere in the mid Top 100 and then STAYED there? It would be very sad to have given up your favorite name out of fear of future popularity and then have it end up right where you would have liked it.<\/p>\n

In short, I think the name Declan is experiencing a coming-into-fashion that to me makes the name more useable rather than less. I don’t think it will be the next Aiden, but if it WERE to be the next Aiden I still don’t think it would be the next Aiden. I’d vote for going ahead and using your favorite.<\/p>\n

Turning our attention to the girl-name list, my own clear favorite is Margaret. I’ve known one little girl named Margaret and she greatly increased my already considerable appreciation for the name. And I love family names.<\/p>\n

Based on your preferences, I’d probably steer you away from Charlotte: I think of that as another name of the sort that rose unexpectedly fast and got a lot of attention for getting a lot of attention. And Sophia and Madeline are also very popular, if popularity bothers you—but when I see Alexander and Benjamin on your boy-name list, I suspect what actually bothers you is a sudden spike in popularity right at the time you use the name, rather then popularity itself.<\/p>\n

My main issue with Madeline is that there are two ways to pronounce it and a dozen ways to spell it. We briefly had a cat named Madeline and even with a CAT I found the hassle more than I wanted to deal with.<\/p>\n

For the middle name, I love Anne if it works with your first-name choice: a family name, and especially appropriate if a boy’s middle name would honor your husband.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Name update!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Hi Swistle!<\/p>\n

Thanks for your help with choosing
\na name for baby He@ld. I was convinced we were having a boy, and his name would have been Declan, but our baby GIRL finally arrived 8 days late on January 13. We named her Vivian Margaret, and the name fits her perfectly!
\nThank you!
\nAnne<\/p>\n

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Dear Swistle, I am an avid reader of your blog and have always fantasized about naming my children. The time is finally here, and I am due with my first in January! My name is Anne, DH is Dave, and our last name is Heal(e)d,pronounced as in what a doctor does to you. We have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10178","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2Ea","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10178","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10178"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10178\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10866,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10178\/revisions\/10866"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}