I think your finding that real-life scandals can decrease popularity, but negative fictional portrayals don't decrease popularity, can simply be explained by different baselines. Real-life scandals are more likely to occur with people who have more common names, therefore their name frequency can fall by a meaningful amount. Compare to Lolita: the frequency started very low, and if <0.1% of parents are weirdos who want to name their kid something edgy, that explains the spike.
Another interesting analysis would be to compare hero vs. villain names from the same movie (e.g. Ariel vs. Ursula from The Little Mermaid).
Another possible explanation for the 25-to-30-year echo surges on Damien, Regan, and Forrest: those cohorts of parents grew up among more people their own age with those names, and more strongly internalized them as common, ordinary choices.
I haven't seen the movie, but in the book Lolita is a nickname, the main character is "Dolores on the dotted line, but in my arms she was always Lolita."
My name is April. I was in elementary school when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles became a thing and everyone started calling me "April O'Neal." I leaned into it and became the biggest TMNT fan you'd ever seen and became very good at drawing each turtle and wrote ridiculous fanfic on our family's old word processor. I still have the printouts from that computer paper with the perforated hole strips ;)
"There is a possibility that some cinema-inspired baby trends are a function of phonetics rather than symbolism—hearing an unfamiliar name may be more important than the meaning attached to that character."
Names are very vibe-based like this. One of the more fascinating examples to me is Daleyza, a name that was invented for the daughter of the host of a Spanish-speaking reality show and immediately hit #588 on the SSA charts, despite her being born partway through the relevant year (2013) -- making it to #228 in 2014! It's still in the top half today. (Nevaeh is a similar invented-name, but one with a clear enough relationship to a real word, so you can deduce how it became independent more easily.)
There's an interesting "collective unconsciousness" visible in baby naming. Names in a given cohort tend to be stylistically similar, but the crazy thing is, people like these "similar names" well before they're giving them to any babies. I knew a lot of people who independently came up with Luna as a "cool, interesting, unusual name" at a young age. (Including myself.)
I'm a little surprised this post didn't have Madison, the *archetypal* media-name. Absolutely unbelievable curve on that one -- possibly the only media-name that broke free completely, such that it not only overtook its source material's popularity but totally eclipsed it. You can spot if a writer didn't do their research by if they have a female character named Madison who would've been born before the mid-1980s.
I used to have what I thought was an unremarkable name, but the Internet has since done some weird things with “Chad”...
I was waiting for a graph depicting the popularity of the name Adolph before and after 1938.
I think your finding that real-life scandals can decrease popularity, but negative fictional portrayals don't decrease popularity, can simply be explained by different baselines. Real-life scandals are more likely to occur with people who have more common names, therefore their name frequency can fall by a meaningful amount. Compare to Lolita: the frequency started very low, and if <0.1% of parents are weirdos who want to name their kid something edgy, that explains the spike.
Another interesting analysis would be to compare hero vs. villain names from the same movie (e.g. Ariel vs. Ursula from The Little Mermaid).
Another possible explanation for the 25-to-30-year echo surges on Damien, Regan, and Forrest: those cohorts of parents grew up among more people their own age with those names, and more strongly internalized them as common, ordinary choices.
I haven't seen the movie, but in the book Lolita is a nickname, the main character is "Dolores on the dotted line, but in my arms she was always Lolita."
I absolutely enjoyed this read...the randomness in naming is something else "late 90's, early 90's" imagine what a Monica might be feeling right now 😂
Even though it’s a different spelling, is Ronald Reagan the cause for a downward spike for Regan in the 1980s.
There is some charm in tracking trends in baby names and the reason behind these trends…
A couple of stories that I could gather:
“I got my name from Connie Chung. So did they.” A great story about what inspired Asian parents & kids in the USA when it comes to finding their English name. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/05/11/opinion/connie-chung-named-after.html
Fiftytwo.in had done an equally intriguing story on things that inspired scores of Indian parents when it came to naming their kids https://fiftytwo.in/story/the-namesakes/
My name is April. I was in elementary school when the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles became a thing and everyone started calling me "April O'Neal." I leaned into it and became the biggest TMNT fan you'd ever seen and became very good at drawing each turtle and wrote ridiculous fanfic on our family's old word processor. I still have the printouts from that computer paper with the perforated hole strips ;)
"There is a possibility that some cinema-inspired baby trends are a function of phonetics rather than symbolism—hearing an unfamiliar name may be more important than the meaning attached to that character."
Names are very vibe-based like this. One of the more fascinating examples to me is Daleyza, a name that was invented for the daughter of the host of a Spanish-speaking reality show and immediately hit #588 on the SSA charts, despite her being born partway through the relevant year (2013) -- making it to #228 in 2014! It's still in the top half today. (Nevaeh is a similar invented-name, but one with a clear enough relationship to a real word, so you can deduce how it became independent more easily.)
There's an interesting "collective unconsciousness" visible in baby naming. Names in a given cohort tend to be stylistically similar, but the crazy thing is, people like these "similar names" well before they're giving them to any babies. I knew a lot of people who independently came up with Luna as a "cool, interesting, unusual name" at a young age. (Including myself.)
I'm a little surprised this post didn't have Madison, the *archetypal* media-name. Absolutely unbelievable curve on that one -- possibly the only media-name that broke free completely, such that it not only overtook its source material's popularity but totally eclipsed it. You can spot if a writer didn't do their research by if they have a female character named Madison who would've been born before the mid-1980s.
Love it! Love the idea that there is no way for a work of art to tarnish a name. I noticed the same thing with “Jolene”