The epic rise and fall of the name Heather | Hacker News Reader

The epic rise and fall of the name Heather

qz.com

85 pointsnikbackm78 comments

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Every time Baby Name Wizard is mentioned, I have to post the link to the most interesting blog post ever written:

http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2007/7/where-all-boys...

> More on this in the months to come...

What came of this?

Last updated 2006.

Obviously I can't speak for the original researcher but I can contribute this: in the past 12 years, in England, variations of Mohamed have become the most common boys' name, putting a rather distinct and punctuated end to the dominance of the traditional "big four" (George, John, James, Edward).

It's not quite that simple: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/sep/21/oliver-...

Relevant quotes: > Muhammad was the 10th most popular name for boys, but if the alternative spellings of Mohammed or Mohammad were included, it would be about as popular as Oliver and its variants, such as Olly, across England and Wales, the ONS said.

> Muslims make up about 5% of the UK population, but Muslim families are more likely to call their sons Mohammed than any other name with an Islamic tradition, the data suggested.

One update from 2012:

http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2012/5/the-shape-of-b...

Even more fun with names: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-tell-someones-ag... (2014)

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817959

When I lived in Scotland, there was a weather presenter called Heather and every night after the news it was (insert Scottish accent) "Heather with the weather!".

Recently the UK Office of National Statistics released the 2017 baby names, having a niece born last year this was of great interest to me so I know the dataset quite well.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...

So that is 43 Heathers born last year in the UK. Not very many, however, compare that to the 106 Margarets born last year. Margaret is an unpopular name, however, Margaret was all the rage a century ago, Prime Ministers and Royal Family members are testament to that. But nowadays the name has gone the way of 'Adolf' (of which zero were brought into the world in the UK last year).

What I find most interesting about names in the UK is when you have to identify yourself in hospital, with the police or anywhere else where they have access to the 'full database'. Even if you have an extremely common first name then the authorities only need to know your surname and your date of birth to have a pretty good idea who you are and what your National Insurance number is. Add the town or hospital of your birth and they have an exact match. Unless your name really is 'John Smith' and you give your birth town as 'London' there is no chance that the police will be getting you confused with anyone and even then the other 'John Smith' characters can probably be eliminated from enquiries very easily.

The police, secret services and others needing to go undercover go to extraordinary lengths to get the birth certificates and other particulars of 'dead babies' that died a long time ago without distressing anyone except their mothers. You wonder why they do this rather than just make up any old name. Surely they could ask the passport people to just make up an appropriate passport and get the DVLA (drivers licence people) to do likewise? Well no, the statistics are quite hard to fiddle, you wouldn't be able to just fake a 'Heather' or even a 'John' as people really are not as anonymous as you might think.

Here is a good read on how the snitches do it properly, in this case the Metropolitan Police 'Special Branch':

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jun/29/undercover-sec...

Here the story is about going undercover in the former anti-globalisation movement.

Regarding the name 'Margaret', for me it is a bell-weather of name popularity, a reference point for other names to be compared by.

In the book The Day of the Jackal, this is covered well. The assassin goes to a cemetery, looks for gravestones of infants who would have been the same age as him and finagles that child’s birth certificate using info from a local vicar. With that, he’s able to get all the other documents, including a passport. And then he’s off to assassinate people.

I'd be careful about using a movie as a how-to guide for anything other than making a movie. They routinely make up any sort of nonsense needed to make the plot move forward. This is quite obvious when the topic is something I know more about than a lay person.

For example, in the Revenant, the hero goes swimming for extended periods in an ice-filled river.

TDotJ was a good movie, though :-)

There’s also a sense of ethics involved in portraying criminal hijinks, because you don’t always want to advertise how to commit difficult crimes. For example, most of the meth production techniques in Breaking Bad were utterly fictitious.

This has been shown to have worked, historically, and I believe in relatively recent times someone was able to request some documents in the name of Frederick Forsyth (the original author) using similar techniques.

It's surprisingly easy to get a Birth Certificate, for instance, which is used for ID purposes and can be the route to (legitimate) passports etc. You need some relatively obscure information about the birth, but this can often be found in digitised records through places like ancestry.co.uk

I have no experience of doing this illictly, but in order to get proper identification documents for my girlfriend, it only took a bit of digging, and a free trial account at ancestry.co.uk (which I then cancelled) and the appropriate fee to the General Register Office. It certainly felt at the time like that could easily be abused.

A classic example of identifying the threat model when designing a security system.

There's no point in making a very expensive and complicated system to deny ID cards to international "Day of the Jackal" level of murdering terrorists because if you make the documentation process more complicated than simply killing someone who looks like the terrorist and taking their wallet...

Meanwhile the actual threat model for identity theft is a dude setting up an assembly line of dozens or hundreds of fake IDs to get loans from banks that are never repaid. The registry is somewhat lax, the registry of registry users is somewhat better run. I can request my birth certificate be mailed to me and as long as nothing interesting happens, nobody cares... but if a couple bad loans were documented by BCs mailed to me at my house... this is why the BC request process seems a heck of a lot more interested in legally identifying who is getting the certificates than it is in how much I "deserve" to get the certificates.

Just to open a bank account, with no credit line, I had to provide my entire residence history including flats [ie apartments, ~condos] I'd stayed in decades ago. I was already a customer with that bank for the decades since I'd lived temporarily in those flats.

Census data indicates abode and no doubt one can buy a listing of addressees at a residence over a particular period from the post-office. Not sure how you can fake that except to be an immigrant, then you need papers for that.

I guess you have to choose your mark.

Forsyth did work as an MI6 spy, so the procedure may well have been known to him.

>They routinely make up any sort of nonsense needed to make the plot move forward. This is quite obvious when the topic is something I know more about than a lay person. For example, in the Revenant, the hero goes swimming for extended periods in an ice-filled river.

Lewis Pugh might demur: https://www.redbull.com/gb-en/lewis-pugh-north-pole-icy-swim

In the cited article, he's carefully taken care of by others when coming out of the water. Otherwise, he'd be dead. You don't just climb out and you're fine, like our hero.

Besides, the article calls the stunt death-defying for a reason. If you fall off a boat in the arctic, you're dead before they can reach you.

I’ve never seen the movie but I read the book a long time ago. The description in TDOTJ of how to get a legitimate passport with false information is almost exactly the same as what the the police spies did for infiltrating political activist groups in the UK. I wouldn’t try it in the UK now though. Death and birth cert records are now collated at a national level. That’s not true in the US so it’s still possible. The record keeping procedures vary by state. Some states do it centrally, some are stored at the county level. The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

Social Security Death Index is nationwide in the US and seemingly instantaneous, certainly no more than a day or two to update.

Although half your argument is invalid, the other half remains perfectly valid, along with the overall conclusions, etc.

SSDI is pretty useful for recent (dead in the last century or so) genealogical research.

How about someone who died abroad, how would that get recorded in the UK, say you die in Papua New Guinea (not a particularly strong civic administration system AFAIK)? ...

> Quartz examined the names that were once among the top five for girls or boys and then fell out of the top 1,000. Among the eight names that met this criteria, which all happened to be girl names, Heather had the fastest descent.

Interesting... I knew baby names followed fashions, but do girl names follow fashions much more quickly than boy names? And would it also somehow be related to women's clothing fashions seeming to also change far more quickly than men's?

Try playing around with this interactive graph, hosted on the same site mentioned in the article: www.babynamewizard.com/voyager . Not exactly a refutation of your hypothesis, but it does seem to indicate that both boy and girl names are following the same trend of increasing diversity over time, leading to reduced absolute dominance of any given name. If those trends are the same, and if we assume that both parents are just as involved in the naming process regardless of boy or girl, then it may be that there's not much of a difference in the faddishness of names.

If I were to propose a counter-hypothesis, it may seem as though boy's names are less faddish because of cultural tendencies to name children after biblical figures, of which there are many more men than women. Names like e.g. Matthew, Timothy, Benjamin are more-or-less timeless because of this (though of course they'll still wax and wane like any other), whereas people seeking girl names are relatively out of luck: you've got Mary, other Mary, um... Delilah (if you're okay with the whole "treachery" thing)... strangely Eve has never seen the same enduring popularity as Adam.

In a similar vein, it seems that boys are more prone to be named after ancestors, for which I offer the anecdotal evidence of how few women are "Juniors" compared to men. (And all of this is assuming western culture, I have no clue as to naming practices elsewhere.)

> whereas people seeking girl names are relatively out of luck: you've got Mary, other Mary, um... Delilah (if you're okay with the whole "treachery" thing)... strangely Eve has never seen the same enduring popularity as Adam.

Just off the top of my head: Deborah, Esther, Leah, Rachel, Rebecca, Ruth, Sara(h)

Maybe if you just want to stick to the NT you'll be limited to Mary (and "the other Mary" has evolved into Marlene in modern times). But I'm not really sure... I grew up Jewish, so I'm not too familiar with what is and isn't in the NT.

True, I grew up Catholic, so maybe I'm only slightly ashamed that I forgot all about Rachel and Ruth. :)

I would think that the reason few women are "Juniors" is because the assumption is that they will likely marry and lose the family name anyway. I'm not actually sure what happens to the suffix when Sue Smith Jr, daughter of Sue Smith Sr. becomes Sue Roberts or whatever, but presumably the suffix is dropped at that point since it is no longer needed for disambiguation.

> strangely Eve has never seen the same enduring popularity as Adam

That's like saying Jesus has never seen the same enduring popularity as Mary. Chava is a pretty conventional name.

Jesus as a name is quite popular, though. According to the site I linked above, in 2016 Jesus was the 134th most popular name for boys; Mary was the 127th most popular name for girls; Maria the 113th; Eve the 456th; Adam the 75th.

Jesus is not a popular name among English speakers. It's popular among Spanish speakers. (Joshua is currently popular, but according to your link that popularity reaches all the way back to the hallowed days of the 1970s.)

Similarly, Eve doesn't have enduring popularity among English-speaking Christians, but that's a very different claim from saying that it hasn't seen enduring popularity.

Interesting, just watched the movie Heathers on Netflix a few days ago. Not what you'd expect out of a late 80s teen movie, besides the shoulder pads, haha.

Heathers was only barely a counterculture movie when it was released. It's a dark comedy that follows the 80s underdog vs bullies trope. I can't imagine how anything like it would ever be released in the repressive school shootings era and that's probably not a good thing.

Agreed, my mind was boggling as I considered how much more gritty and “real” most entertainment is today, yet here was a character nonchalantly using a gun in the cafeteria… now beyond the pale.

Though a musical version of Heathers did come out just a few years ago.

I missed that.

It was a smaller musical--off-broadway. I think it's playing in London at the moment.

Not bad although it felt a bit unnecessary as a lot of musicals adapted from fondly remembered films seem to be.

> Liquid sounds are those that involve using the tip of the tongue and create air flow through the mouth.

English sounds satisfying that definition: th t d l sh ch j and arguably r

Sounds that are actually liquids: l and r

The "r" is an interesting one. I only recently found out that the "r" isn't pronounced in many words by most of the English in England. It was thanks to some homework that one of my children came home with. It had a list of homophones for them to practice, and on that list were "saw" and "sore", which both me and my wife thought must have been added by mistake because for both of us "saw" and "sore" have distinct pronunciations. So we did a bit of research. What we found was that English as spoken in England is considered "non-rhotic" where the "r" isn't pronounced before a consonant or at the end of words (hence "saw" and "sore" are both pronounced "sau"), whereas myself and my wife come from countries where the language / accent is "rhotic" and the "r" is pronounced (so "saw" and "sore" are pronounced as they are spelled).

If the English your kids speak at school is rhothic, then including saw/sore as a pair of homophones is a mistake anyway, since the whole point of homophones is that they sound the same, which is always dependent on accent. Teaching homophones as a list to be practiced reminds me of not being allowed to calculate 4-7 because negative numbers hadn't been taught yet. It essentially removes the actual understanding from the learning process.

>What we found was that English as spoken in England //

Ha, there's such variations in accent it's quite hard to make statements like this that apply generally.

Some like to add "r"s where they don't exist too: Bath - barth vs ba-th.

Strangely my mother and [only] one of my sons both have this more RP approach to pronounciation.

I think the "bath" is the long "a" vs short "a" split[0] (usually associated with north of England vs south of England) rather than r insertion. There is however something called the "intrusive r" among "non rhotic" speakers "such as those in most of England and Wales" [1] which I learned about thanks to this recent research, where "r"s are inserted where they don't exist, e.g. "supernova-r-in the sky" and "law-r-and order".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap-bath_split

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linking_and_intrusive_R

>"such as those in most of England and Wales"

Aren't Welsh dialects generally rhotic?

They are not adding an r. That's a long a. True, they are pronouncing bath like many English people would pronounce barth; but that is without an audible r.

It's not rolled, but if you don't call that an "r" sound then there's no "r" in many areas of UK. It's different to a long a, it's like a shortened "r" with no roll and the tongue further forward, but not as hollow as a long a.

Presumably you think "hearth" doesn't have discernible "[a]r" sound either?

> if you don't call that an "r" sound then there's no "r" in many areas of UK.

By itself, that is not a compelling argument. There is in fact no postvocalic R in many areas of the UK.

I think what I'm referring to is that shown in the map (1950s) at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhoticity_in_English#Distribut.... The alveolar and retroflex variants, which to my ear give an r sound distinct from, for example [ɑː].

As a middle age person myself I find it interesting that names from my grandparents generation are back in fashion again after practically unheard of in my generation. No one one wants an odd-sounding name. Hence why the lyrics to Johnny Cash's Boy Named Sue song are interesting.

> No one one wants an odd-sounding name

Odd-sounding name are specifically what I looked for when naming my daughters. No one wants a banal name !

Parents like odd-sounding/-spelt names for their children. Often the children, when old enough, are not quite so on-board with having to spell their name multiple times in any situation in which it helps to transmit it to others. When none of your friends can spell your name, and everyone in your locality pronounces it wrong when reading it, then Diarmaid, your parents - IMO - chose poorly.

Of course that raises the question of translation, transliteration, and language specific names (first-language Chinese speakers in the UK seem always to have a Western name - my friend says she got hers from her English teacher).

Funny thing is, I actually got to pick my name as an adult (I'm transgender).

I made sure that my new first and middle names were both common for my birth year. Both names were in the top 20, and my middle name was actually #2.

I actually did consider an uncommon name for my middle name, though. In fact, the name I was considering wasn't so much uncommon as it was unheard of outside of fictional characters. I figured I could have a normal name as my first name, go by that, and only write out my middle name if I wanted to have some fun. Ultimately, though, I got cold feet. I was worried I'd regret it if I picked a name, even a middle name, that called so much attention to me, and I ended up using as a middle name a name I'd previously considered for my first name but ended up very narrowly rejecting.

It worked out for the better. I like my initials better the way things ended up: AJB forms a nice three-letter ligature, while ASB doesn't. And I have a good pen name that I've started using on occasion for projects I don't want to use my real name on (e.g. anime fansubbing).

I have a lovely story from a friend of mine from France. He was christened with a very ordinary first name but no middle name. He always felt that he'd missed out on a middle name. Well, about the age of 10 he started to pester his parents to be allowed to have a middle name. They agreed that if he could choose one and he didn't change his mind, he could have a fully legal middle name for his 16th birthday. Sure enough, he chose a name immediately and stuck to it. And that is why the middle name on his passport, driver's license, tax return and bank statements is Crocodile.

> No one wants a banal name !

A lot of people do. Not saying this is the case here, but picking unusual names can be unwise and harmful to children [1][2][3]. Please be careful and considerate of what your children might think in the future.

[1] https://www.parenting.com/baby-names/name-advice/why-picking...

[2] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/family/parenting/all-parents-sho...

[3] https://nypost.com/2017/05/12/your-babys-unique-name-might-r...

> No one wants a banal name !

Someone clearly wasn't an introverted 6th grader whose dream was to have no one notice them for the entire school year.

I recommend that parents give their children ordinary-sounding first names and interesting middle names, and then call them by their middle name colloquially and let them use their first name for banal tasks such as government forms and job applications, or if they decide they don't want to stand out. :)

I really like that. In interviews they are Robert, and at home they can be Percival if they want.

So true...I was "Brett" growing up and to this day the number of "Brett"s I've heard of is less than a dozen.

As a kid I loathed it and promised myself I'd change to a nice "jim" when I was old enough. Not only was I a victim of bullying and felt my name made me stick out, but the kids would call me "Brat" while the adults used "Brent" or "Bret", and I truly thought the unusual name made it all worse.

As an adult I don't particularly like my name, but I do appreciate being unusual. When another "Brett" does show up in conversation or text, I take a second to realize it isnt about me. (The current US supreme court nomination has been less than fun in an extra way for me)

I cant imagine how different it must be to have a common name and default to assuming that your own name probably means someone else.

I used to sit next to a Bob Smith, and everytime he called someone new on the phone for work (we did that back in the day) he had to follow up with "no, for real".

In 4,5th,6th grade my plan was to change my name to the letter ‘X’ when I grew up. “ that’s soooo coool!” plays some mega man

I love a good name, one that is spelled such that many/most native speakers of the language will pronounce it approximately correctly when they see it, and isn’t too difficult to spell, but also lets a person feel a baseline differentiation - to not be drone#6472567.

I am <banal name>#4235862, and I DO find that annoying. Often cannot even differentiate me from the many holders of my name by adding my last initial, or even my entire last name.

Grass is always greener, I guess. I would love to be unsearchable on the Internet. There are fewer than five people in the world with my name as far as I know. One of them, younger than me, did start playing college football about a decade ago and all of a sudden took over the top search results, which was good, but it's still pretty easy to distinguish us with any kind of real search.

(My first name is nothing unusual, this is due to my last name. I gave my kids what I would consider fairly common first names, though again due to the last name there are only a few others of each.)

I really get pissed when popular software takes on humann names. Like for example , the name “Siri”, Alexa, Cortana are all dead names now and the poor souls who are named that right now!!! Also people named Jason who work in tech (.json files)

I wasn't aware Cortana was ever a human name.

I find "Jason" hilarious because I have multiple coworkers with that name... I wonder how often they turn their heads whenever someone talks about JSON. Fortunately, where I live, almost everybody pronounces JSON with stress on the second syllable (jase-ON / [d͡ʒɛɪs'ɒn] or [d͡ʒɛɪ'sɒn]) so it's not quite a homophone. I have a friend who works for a company where people actually do pronounce JSON like "Jason", and he's ranted to me so many times about how the way his coworkers pronounce things is weird (he's also ranted about how they pronounce "epoch" like "epic").

And at least Siri isn't used much in the Anglosphere... I still feel sorry for people in Nordic countries who can't use that name anymore, but I honestly didn't even know it was a human name until after the Apple product came out.

Oh, and my cousin has a kid named Alexis. Somehow, I have a feeling that they will never ever get an Amazon Echo. It would be too awkward if Alexa pipes up whenever she's trying to talk to her kid.

I think you can change a setting to get the Echo to reply to "Amazon", "Echo", or "Computer" instead.

The problem that one finds is that suddenly many parents want the same odd-sounding names for their offspring. My parents never had classmates named Lisa, but I had plenty such. There were no Caitlins around when I was in school, but there were a lot when my son got there.

I have a hard time thinking of comparable trends in boys name--I suppose Justin was one that was suddenly popular around 1990.

I've usually heard Tyler as the boy's name that goes hand in hand with Caitlin.

I'm very glad I have a common ("banal") name, I don't want to stand out for the wrong reason. I don't want to come off as uneducated and unemployable (like it or not, and for whatever reason, people with uncommon names are less educated and have lower employment). With a common name I'm noticed and remembered for my personality/attributes and not my name.

Yeah, but you have to admit "Chlamydia" has an exotic Mediterranean sound to it. ;-)

Exotic names are your parents expressing themselves through you, when you might prefer to express yourself... yourself.

IMO banal names from different time periods that still work today are best.

> Exotic names are your parents expressing themselves through you

All names are your parents expressing themselves through you.

I also fail to see how one can no longer express themselves due to a given name.

> All names are your parents expressing themselves through you.

I mean that parents can restrain their self-expression by picking an inconspicuous name.

> I also fail to see how one can no longer express themselves due to a given name.

OK, I overstated my case. I was only referring to the name drawing unwanted attention at first impressions (maybe not even meeting in person).

Plenty of people do. My first and middle names are 2 of the most common men's names for the last 40 years and I'm fine with that. Your daughters may well grow up agreeing with you or resenting you. If you'd named them Jennifer and Mary they may have thanked you for not leaning into a trend and picking something stupid like Apple, or they may always yearn to be unique and different.

TL;dr- YOU don't want a banal name for your children, but you have no idea how that's going to work out long term.

I have a depressingly banal name and have experienced pretty serious annoyance about it. I wouldn’t say depression, but when society already makes me feel like a faceless drone, being <banal name>#476 exacerbates the problem substantially.

Soon there will be many young Bernards and Doloreses running around. Hard to wrap your head around.

My two-year-old grandson Henry has that Shakespearean king look already.

Many two-year-olds do.

My father's parents: Wilbur and Cleytus, the latter of which doesn't even show up in babynamewizard.com.

I don't think those will be back in fashion any time soon.

Cletus, of which Cleytus may be a variation, has a long Christian tradition going back to the third Pope, St. Cletus (also known as Anacletus, which makes me wonder if his evil twin was named Katacletus).

It's interesting that "Betty" is on the list. I'd always thought it was a nickname for Elizabeth, not a standalone name in its own right.

It's both a diminutive of Elizabeth and a name in and of itself. Same with Betsy and Liz. Betty can also be a diminutive of Beatrice or Bethia.

Betty White is Betty and Betty Ford is Elizabeth.

There's no "rules" that you can't name someone a name that was traditionally a diminutive of another name, and it's not even particularly uncommon. Alex is common as both a diminutive of Alexandria, a diminutive of Alexandra, and a name of its own. Zach/Zack/Zac can be a diminutive of Zechariah, Zachary, Isaac, or a name in its own right. Max can be short for Maximilian, Maximus, Maxim (which is a shorter form of Maximus), Maxwell, or it can be just Max.

I'm a mid-40's single guy and blonde Heather's are my thing (dating one right now). Probably because there were so many of them growing up and that influenced me somehow. There are quite a few Heather's on Match.com as well. So it's looking good for me!!!

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