Reply to Why are people in the DC area so weird about name popularity?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I've never encountered people more weird about this issue than in the DC area. I've met three parents in the last year of living here who have confessed to me that they stress that their kids names are "too popular." None of these kids have top 10 names, their kids are the only kids I've ever met with their names, and they are nice names. I've also heard women in our neighborhood say some not nice things about names they deem too popular, or certain "name trends" they seem to be disparaging. One mom I know told a group of us that she poured over lists of names outside the top 1000 names to choose her kids names, and studied naming trends to ensure that her kids' names would not be too popular or likely to become trendy. When she said this (at a backyard bbq), other women in the conversation nodded and said things like "oh, that's so smart" and no one else seemed to be thinking what I was thinking, which was "do you have ocd by any chance?"

What the heck? I can understand not wanting to give your baby one of the most popular names (though I also think there are good reasons why people choose these names -- they are popular for good reasons, generally) but people here seem obsessed with giving their kids unpopular names and ensuring that they will never encounter another person with the same name. Can anyone explain why this is? I moved here from a large West Coast city and there's definitely some of that but people are not as self-conscious or vocal about it and it's countered by people wanting to give their kids names that are recognizably names and wanting a name that will fit in. The people out West who obsess over original names are a specific type of person (what we used to call hipsters, I know don't know how they are identified now) and are considered a little fringe. Like that guy at work who needs you to know he knows more obscure bands than you do -- it's a kind of annoying personality quirk, not a universal value. But here it seems mainstream.

What am I missing? Why are people here like this?[/quote]

It goes with the generalized anxiety that permeates the area.

It also doesn’t make sense. Who would deliberately give their child an obscure name?[/quote]

We gave our child an obscure name. We spent many hours looking for names whose meanings and histories / culture mattered or was connected to our lives and how/where we met. It doesn’t matter to us whether the name is or becomes popular — we’d be glad for that to happen. We then also have a very common middle name that is a family name so there is a fallback option if our child preferred something less obscure. [/quote]

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