Allyson sent me this letter, and I thought it was the sort of letter that might be VERY REASSURING, considering how VERY MANY letters we receive with parents worried that there will be “five in every class” of their favorite names:<\/p>\n
Hi Swistle,<\/p>\n
I’m not sure if this would be of interest to you, but I was given a copy of the class list at my kids’ daycare\/preschool. So many of the emails you get have parents worried about using a certain name due to popularity. This list is pretty interesting- out of the 160 kids, there are only 13 names that are listed more than once, even considering alternate spellings. Of the repeats, 10 names are used twice, one name is used three times, and two names are used four times.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
She went on to list WHICH names were the repeated ones, but she and I have agreed not to post those here because it seems as if it puts the focus on THOSE SPECIFIC NAMES. That is, it doesn’t matter which names were repeated; the point is that so few of them WERE repeated. I think in the anxious stage of baby-naming, if I’d seen that one of my favorites was used FOUR TIMES in one daycare\/preschool, I’d think that name should be off the list; but actually it only means there is a coincidental pocket of that name in one school.<\/p>\n
For example, the two names that were repeated four times each: you might expect those to be Top 10 names. But they were not! One is a Top 50 (but not Top 10) name, and the other is a Top 100 (but not Top 50) name. The name used three times is also a Top-50-but-not-Top-10 name. Two of the repeated names in the list are not even Top 100 names. Only ONE name on the list is a Top 10 name.<\/p>\n
The point is that name statistics are national. No one can reassure anyone that there WON’T be a crazy classroom where there are five students with the same name. We can, however, offer statistic-unlikelihood comfort.<\/p>\n
We can also offer the perhaps counter-intuitive comfort that there isn’t much that can be done about it: you can give your child the #993 name Cordelia, when you liked the #4 name Isabella better but didn’t want her to be “one of five in her class,” and then in her class there may be two Cordelias and no Isabellas. My brother has a name that was ranked well into the 200s for his birth year, and he was in school all the way through with another boy who had the same name with the same less-common spelling. My name was just barely out of the Top 50 for the year I was born, but there was only ONE classroom my entire school experience that had another Kristen\/Kristin in it.<\/p>\n
One reason I LOVE getting class lists is that they’re almost always surprising. Some years, there is no duplication at all. Other years, a class will have two Connors, two Williams, two Madisons and an Addison, and three Joeys—plus a Zoe, a Zoey, and a Chloe. Elizabeth had a class of the latter type last year, and she said that furthermore, both Connors had the same MIDDLE name, AND the same surname initial! (They solved it by having one go by Connor and the other go by his first and middle initials.)<\/p>\n
I’m not sure exactly the kind of discussion I’m trying to start here, but I trust you to take it from here. I think it would be interesting to hear about Interesting Duplications (two Cordelias, for example), and about surprising NON-duplications (only one Emma, for example). Or we can talk generally about class lists. Or about the impossibility of avoiding duplication. Or about how different areas seem to have different concentrations of certain names, so that one school might not have ANYONE named Everly, while another school is simply BURSTING with them. Or if you have a class list nearby, you can count duplicates: not necessarily listing WHICH names are duplicates, but just how many ARE duplicated. Or you can discuss anything else the topic brings to mind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Allyson sent me this letter, and I thought it was the sort of letter that might be VERY REASSURING, considering how VERY MANY letters we receive with parents worried that there will be “five in every class” of their favorite names: Hi Swistle, I’m not sure if this would be of interest to you, but […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-32R","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11709","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=11709"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11711,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11709\/revisions\/11711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}