
The epic rise and fall of the name Heather - nikbackm
https://qz.com/1390135/the-epic-rise-and-fall-of-the-name-heather/
======
hudibras
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...](http://www.babynamewizard.com/archives/2007/7/where-all-boys-end-up-
nowadays)

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

What came of this?

~~~
jackhack
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).

~~~
aleksei
It's not quite that simple:
[https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/sep/21/oliver-...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/sep/21/oliver-
olivia-most-popular-baby-names-second-year-running)

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.

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groestl
Even more fun with names: [https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-tell-
someones-ag...](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-to-tell-someones-age-
when-all-you-know-is-her-name/) (2014)

HN thread:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817959](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7817959)

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ironic_ali
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!".

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Theodores
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...](https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/livebirths/datasets/babynamesenglandandwalesbabynamesstatisticsgirls)

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.

~~~
nindalf
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.

~~~
WalterBright
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 :-)

~~~
Nursie
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.

~~~
VLM
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

------
crazygringo
> _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?

~~~
kibwen
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.)

~~~
amyjess
> 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.

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

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mixmastamyk
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.

~~~
ecocentrik
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.

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

~~~
ecocentrik
I missed that.

~~~
ghaff
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.

------
thaumasiotes
> 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

~~~
m-i-l
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).

~~~
pbhjpbhj
>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.

~~~
m-i-l
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap-bath_split)

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

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

Aren't Welsh dialects generally rhotic?

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peter303
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.

~~~
liotier
> 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 !

~~~
SketchySeaBeast
> 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.

~~~
kibwen
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. :)

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

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amyjess
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.

~~~
astura
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.

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stuff4ben
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!!!

