Ethan, Meet Alyssa

I was flabbergasted to discover that, according to the Social Security Administration, the third most popular name for newborn girls in the year of my daughter’s birth wasn’t Ashley, but Jennifer. At least 80 percent of my daughter’s female classmates in elementary school were Ashleys. I’m amused to note that in the UK, Ashley is a boy’s name, as it was in Gone With the Wind.

Having resided half a decade in said UK, I am able to tell you that lots (loads!) of extremely popular names there virtually never make it across the Atlantic. When I was trying to recruit theatrical casts in London, I received headshots and resumes from veritable armies of Tamsyns, Gemmas, and Natashas, but when was the last time you heard of one here? Likewise, you can go years here without encountering a Nigel or a Simon, but the UK’s crawling with ‘em.

To what may we attribute Jacob having been the No. 1 name for American baby boys in 2009? Cleveland Browns quarterback Jake Delholmme’s career hasn’t been nearly spectacular enough to have inspired fathers to want to name their sons after him. The only Jacobs who come to what’s left of my own personal mind are Javits, a prominent Jewish politician in New York a million years ago, and Dylan, Bob’s boy, and the latter spells it with a k instead of a c. (If it were I, it would be Jakov, though I suppose schoolyard thugs might pronounce it Jackoff.) I would be able to understand the resurgence of William, which was No. 4 in the year of my own birth, and No. 5 last year, if it were spelled will.i.am, a la the guy in Blackeyed Peas, but it ain’t. Brad, George, Tom, and Johnny, as in Pitt, Clooney, Cruise, and Depp, the era’s biggest male movie stars, are nowhere to be seen on the list of most popular boys’ names.

Schoolyard thugs find a way to make miserable the lives of the meek whatever their names may be.

That the yuppies are reproducing in droves now is evident from the relative popularity of such names as Ethan, Noah (No. 9), Aiden (No. 12), and Logan (No. 17) for boys, and Isabella (No. 2), Madison (No. 7), Addison (No. 12), and Alyssa (No. 19) for girls.

Addison? Madison? WTF? As a past resident of a Midwestern city with the latter name, I can say with a high degree of confidence you wouldn’t want to name your daughter after it, or even to spend longer in it than it takes for you to fill your fuel tank. How’s that bratwurst workin’ for ya?

I’ve never understood the gentile practice of naming a boy after his father. What colossal narcissism! What appalling lack of imagination! And have I railed lately against the use of middle initials? I can understand if you’ve got the same name as 125,000 other people, like Juan Lopez. For everyone else, though, a middle initial suggests an attempt to sound more important. That’s one thing I liked about the Democratic presidents between Johnson and Obama; you can’t get less pretentious than Bill and Jimmy.

It occurred to me the other afternoon that if I were to have children now, I would very much enjoy giving them names like Jamal, Tayshawn and Sheniqu’a. This represents a dramatic sea change from the era of my daughter’s birth, when I hoped to name her Nimrod (as in the Biblical hunter) if she were a boy. Why should Jacob, Joshua, and Noah be popular and Nimrod not?

One thing strikes me as pretty fishy about the Social Security accounting. Latinos make up 12.5 percent of the population, but there isn’t a single latino name on either of the lists — no Jose, no Maria, no Refugio or Raquel? Are we to believe that latino parents are striving so hard for assimilation as to be naming their kids Aiden and Alyssa?

I was always amused by the prospect of the halls of the nation’s convalescent hospitals being lined one day with ancient women called Debbie and Heather, Lisa and Tiffani, Ashley and Jennifer. But this year’s list suggests that the names of 2090’s dementia sufferers will in many cases be identical to 1970’s; Emma, Emily, Abigail, and Grace were all among last year’s most popular girls’ names. Gertrude and Edna stubbornly refuse to make comebacks.