Reality TV, religion give birth to top baby names

STEPHEN OHLEMACHER

Asso­ci­ated Press

WASHINGTON — Real­ity TV is giv­ing birth to some of the most pop­u­lar baby names. No, not Snooki. But Mason, as in Kourt­ney Kardashian’s son, jumped 10 spots to become the sec­ond most pop­u­lar name for new­born boys in 2011.

The more tra­di­tional Sophia is the new top name for girls, while Jacob is No. 1 for boys for the 13th straight year, accord­ing to the list released Mon­day by the Social Secu­rity Administration.

Kar­dashian, the real­ity TV star, gave birth to Mason in Decem­ber 2009 fol­low­ing a heav­ily pub­li­cized preg­nancy. In 2010, Mason jumped from No. 34 to No. 12. Last year, 19,396 baby boys were named Mason, an increase of nearly 4,600, by far the biggest jump for any name.

“It shows what we’re pay­ing atten­tion to, what we’re think­ing about,” said Laura Wat­ten­berg, cre­ator of the web­site babynamewizard.com. “Today, you can’t walk through a super­mar­ket with­out learn­ing more than you hoped to know about the Kar­dashian fam­ily. That’s just reality.”

Round­ing out the top five for boys: William, Jay­den and Noah. Michael came in sixth, the low­est rank­ing since 1948.

Isabella, which had been the top girl’s name for two years, dropped to sec­ond place in 2011. Emma, Olivia and Ava rounded out the top five.

The Social Secu­rity Admin­is­tra­tion pro­vides lists of baby names dat­ing to 1880 on its web­site. The top two names that year were John and Mary. John is now No. 27 and Mary has fallen to No. 112 — the low­est for both names.

The list, which also includes top baby names by state, draws mil­lions of view­ers. The agency hopes that peo­ple go to the web­site to see the baby names and stay to learn about other ser­vices, said Social Secu­rity Com­mis­sioner Michael J. Astrue.

Top girl names tend to be more volatile — chang­ing from year to year — while the top boy names are more sta­ble, Astrue said. William, for exam­ple, has been a pop­u­lar boy’s name for more than 100 years, never falling out of the top 20. Mason is the excep­tion, enter­ing the top 100 for the first time in 1997.

On the girls’ side, Sophia first cracked the top 100 in 1997. Isabella dropped off the list alto­gether from 1949 to 1990.

Social Secu­rity also tracks which names increase in pop­u­lar­ity and which ones drop.

The fastest ris­ing name for girls: Briella, which jumped 394 spots, to No. 497. Briella Calafiore stars in “Jer­sey­li­cious,” a real­ity TV show about bat­tling styl­ists at a beauty salon in Green Brook, N.J. She’s also in a spin­off called “Glam Fairy.”

Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi is the star of another real­ity TV show about New Jer­sey called “Jer­sey Shore.” Snooki has never cracked the list of top 1,000 names, but she is in the midst of a well-publicized preg­nancy, so stay tuned.

Barack and Mitt have never made the list, either. But Willard, which is Mitt Romney’s first name, was on the list as recently as 1989.

Brant­ley was the fastest ris­ing name for boys, jump­ing 416 spots to No. 320. Brant­ley Gilbert is a singer who had a No. 1 coun­try hit called “Coun­try Must Be Coun­try Wide”.

Amer­i­cans get baby names from a lot of places — reli­gion, rel­a­tives and, yes, pop­u­lar cul­ture, Wat­ten­berg said. She likened baby nam­ing trends to “a fos­sil record of our culture.”

Par­ents tend to shy away from names that con­jure up neg­a­tive emo­tions — Adolf fell off the list for good in 1929. But, Wat­ten­berg said, par­ents aren’t nec­es­sar­ily pay­ing homage to celebri­ties when they give their chil­dren the same name. In many cases, they are sim­ply using a name they might not have heard otherwise.

“Celebrity nam­ing is just about the expo­sure and about every­body hear­ing that name at the same time,” Wat­ten­berg said. “It’s not about the fame, it’s about the name.”

Reli­gion con­tin­ues to have a big influ­ence on baby names, but with a twist.

“The tra­di­tional bib­li­cal names were New Tes­ta­ment names — John, James and Mary and Eliz­a­beth,” Wat­ten­berg said. “Today, the hot names are all names from the Old tes­ta­ment pre­cisely because they were neglected for so many generations.”

In addi­tion to Jacob and Noah, Eli­jah at No. 13 and Joshua at No. 14 are all from the Old Testament.

Among the names that fell in pop­u­lar­ity, Brisa dropped more spots than any other — 343 places, to No. 807. Dana, Desiree and Denise also plummeted.

Brett dropped more than any other name for boys, 119 spots, to No. 508. Jamar­ion, Shaun and Jay­don also dropped.

Social Secu­rity counts names with dif­fer­ent spellings sep­a­rately. For exam­ple, Aiden was No. 9 among boys, while Aidan was No. 107 and Aaden was No. 797. Among the girls, Sophia was No. 1 while Sofia was No. 19. Sophie was No. 51. Zoey was No. 28 and Zoe was No. 31.

Elvis returned to the list at No. 904, after drop­ping off for a year. When Elvis dropped off the in 2010, it ended a run that had started in 1955.

Astrue, a big Elvis fan, said he was all shook up when Elvis left the list.

“Con­gress may not lis­ten to me,” Astrue said. “But God bless the Amer­i­can peo­ple for lis­ten­ing to me last year when I raised con­cerns about Elvis drop­ping off.”

Were they lis­ten­ing to him when they named their daugh­ters after the star of “Jerseylicious?”

“I don’t even know what that show’s about,” Astrue said.

Posted by AP News on May 14 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.