Names in the real world and otherwise

[nancylebov]

Here's a site that will show you a graph of the popularity of your name. I can't get the image to show up, but Nancy was popular from about 1950 to 1965, with a very steep rise and steep drop. And, of course, you can put in your own name and see how it's been doing.

There's a map of when my name peaked in each state, an animated map for maximum popularity per state, and a field for theories about why a name was popular when it was. I have no idea for my name. It seems to me like an equally good name for all eras, but what do I know?

The name search feature is fun, and I expect it's driving traffic to Vintage Reprints.... but I can't quite figure out what they sell, or how to get to the name search from the home page, or whether there's a public list of people's theories about name popularity.

I have no idea if there are names that just sort of putter along at a stable level instead of peaking.

Are authors careful about giving their characters probable names? If an author isn't, does it bother you?

Going farther afield, I have no idea how (at least for me) GRRMartin got away with a fantasy which has no obvious connection to our timeline with characters who have a mixture of contemporary names, common names with weird spellings, and totally alien names. He put work into culture-building, but that doesn't explain why all the names aren't alien.

The Natural History of Dragons by Marie Brennan, a book that I mostly liked, made me crazy on that issue-- it's pretty much our world with dragons added. The countries are similar to real world countries, but the names of the countries have no resemblance. The characters have real world names.

Comments

[olimay]

Looks like I'm in for a big shock when all these kids with my first name grow up.
http://www.vintagereprints.net/names/baby.cgi?name=Oliver

Laura Wattenberg on on the Baby Name Wizard blog remarks a lot when fictional names don't seem to match trends or social conventions of the time period. She made some interesting observations about how authors name their fictional female political leaders versus what names real female political leaders tend to have--I just can't locate it in the archives off the top of my head.

Vernor Vinge and Tolkien both explained that they modified the names for accessibility to Anglophones. Tolkien in the appendix actually elucidated how he'd supposedly modified them--mostly swapping endings to fit masculine/feminine connotations. Frodo is still pretty weird, even if it's not Froda. So is Gandalf.

Through exposure to JRPGs and anime I've become more okay with people being named for sound and whimsy alone. If I like the game and the characters themselves, I don't really complain. Some cultural resentment might have driven that too--I still loved Tolkien in middle school and high school, but had long tired of popular fantasy. Part of the reason: they were full of magical medieval European white people. And somehow I felt I couldn't relate to that. Even the stories my D&D fantasy-interested, non-white friends created seemed entirely populated by magical white people.

I was blind to any strong assumed connotations of ethnicity in fantasy JRPGs and anime (although they are there), and that felt refreshing. The characters were mostly just themselves. Maybe their family or tribe figured into their backstory or personality--then they did have an ethnic identity. Maybe the person's name was super-symbolic. But in the end, there was no ultimate rationale behind names, and I think there was an implication that it was unnecessary. I imagine Japanese speakers probably find "Barrett Wallace" pretty foreign and fantasy-worthy, especially with all the katakana the spelling requires. But the main thing is that the characters (good and bad) came across as free-standing individuals. I don't think this would have happened if everyone had alien names or fake Welsh or Germanic ones for the sake of consistency.

In my own space, I find coming up with good fiction names pretty damned hard. I have a few stories that I've been thinking about for years but haven't written down, outside of synopsis, partly because I don't have good names for characters. Some old stories have outright stalled because I became embarrassed with the names I was working with, and couldn't think of better ones. Sometimes I'm on the verge of telling myself to study Akkadian or invent my own language.

[lethargic_man]

Going farther afield, I have no idea how (at least for me) GRRMartin got away with a fantasy which has no obvious connection to our timeline with characters who have a mixture of contemporary names, common names with weird spellings, and totally alien names. He put work into culture-building, but that doesn't explain why all the names aren't alien.

Oh, I'm glad it's not just me. I read the first book (which is as far as I got) waiting for the explanation of how that world had had contact with our world some time in the past, only instead of getting it, I got told that the names we'd seen had been in use for thousands of years, which made my suspension of disbelief come crashing down.

[madfilkentist]

The comic strip "Nancy" was very popular in the fifties and sixties; that may have had something to do with it.