call social services

[dubdobdee]

ok there is a famous list of the famous who got gave GIRL'S NAMES inc. john wayne (marion), ice-t (shirley, hilary benn (ermintrude) and etc

i just discovered the author beverley nichols is a man

so my question is this:

a: in the age of the internet HAS THIS PRACTICE CEASED?
b: does LJ know directly of any small people (ie <10) thus gender-norm liberated?
c: does LJ know directly of any small people (ie <10)* liberated from the hideous prison of ordinary routine sensible naming practice?

*not inc.gaffsie_ewing or jauntyhorseydehorsey obv

Comments

[petrajane.livejournal.com]

You forgot Evelyn Waugh! Neutral names seem to be very in though. I know or have met both girl and boy Leslies, Jordans, Morgans and Regans, amongst others. But it seems more often girls with rakish-sounding chap names rather than the other way round.

[petrajane.livejournal.com]

Then again, in the ruggedly nancy-phobic Antipodes, A Boy Named Sue wld probably be declared a ward of the state (http://www.stuff.co.nz/4628719a10.html)...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

my parents had a male friend called evelyn (v.dishy and i think had a bit of a thing for my mum) so i file this one in the in-between column myself

How can I breathe when there's so much gender variability

[koganbot]

Yes, Jordan is definitely the name with the strongest gender variability these days (I'd place Kelly number two but drifting feminine, while Regan and Morgan just aren't that common either way, at least in the U.S.). I'm guessing there are still more boy Jordans than girls, but that that'll even out with Jordan Pruitt on Radio Disney and Jordin Sparks in the Top 40.



(Speaking of Jordin Sparks, Chris has been a long-time female nickname that hasn't had to make itself diminutive by way of Chrissies and Chrissys. I even know a female Chris who's my age [mid 50s].)

[anthonyeaston.livejournal.com]

up until this year i thot the sculptor lynn chadwick was a man

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

There is a female tennis player - career high ranking 1057 - called Douglas Wink.

There was a girl at university with me whose name was pronounced Gabrielle but spelt Gabriel. I never worked that one out.

Are Hilary and Leslie particularly associated with one sex more than the other now? I find that the more modern unisex names are things like Jamie and Charlie (eg Spears or Dimmock). I am pretty sure that giving children wacky names will never cease! I can't think of any for children under 10 but that is because I barely know any children under 10.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

if there's a continuum here i would place DOUGLAS far into the NOT-AT-ALL-A-BOY'S-NAME

hilary (like evelyn?) was more in-betweeny in the past: i think the girls' won it

i have always slightly resented my name -- ever since i was a tiny it seemed a bit UNMANLY (which is weird as i never gave a TOSS about manliness in any other area, indeed went some way at school towards embracing girliness)

i was also a bit cross that so many ppl my age were called "mark"

[atommickbrane.livejournal.com]

NO SYMPATHY HERE

[koganbot]

For decades and decades girls have been able to take dimunitive boy's nicknames (Billie, Charlie, Sammy), since such nicknames associate with youth, and the feminine is thought of as softer and younger than the male anyway. And see what I wrote to piratemoggy below: formerly male or neutral names - Hilary and Leslie - that are at all feminized will become female over time, since the "strong" side of a strong-weak binary such as masculine-feminine will always be subject to contamination; that is, anything that isn't 100% masculine will eventually be considered feminine.

Marion and Vivian, being homophones with Marianne and Vivienne, are now no longer boy's names.

I wonder if there are parallels with women being allowed to wear men's clothes without its necessarily being a statement about sexuality, but men not being allowed to wear women's.

Also, the strange history of long hair: about the time I was born it was almost all female except for (1) bohemians and intellectuals (but they were of doubtful masculinity anwyay), and (2) bikers and juvenile delinquents and ruffians, I'm guessing because the length associated with unruliness, hence lumpen rebellion. The subsequent '60s counterculture went both ways with it, wearing it both for sexual ambiguity and lumpen ruffianism. Mick Jagger was a totally ambiguous and disturbing figure in this regard: was he hypermale or warmly femme? Long hair still hasn't settled altogether: initially it seemed the victory would be towards feminizing the masculine, peacey and lovey and all that, and guys with long hair like Jerry Lee Lewis with working-class tough-guy affinities cut their hair just as the British Invasion rockers were growing theirs; but a few years on, redneck rockers like Lynyrd Skynyrd kept their hair long, as did tough-guy metal heads. Now long hair on guys is a solidly respectable working-class signifier, plenty of country guys have it, though probably how it's worn makes a difference: Alan Jackson not being too shaggy in his long hair, and he's something of a ladies man, while Shooter Jennings is a tough-guy rocker, w/ facial hair to prove it; Toby Keith isn't sure what to do with his hair. But then, long hair still has Hollyweird and hippie associations (Jason Castro of American Idol, for instance).

Not sure how such tensions play out with names, if there are any names that can't decide whether to go male or female.

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Uniting thread of long hair on men: it is all gross all the time.

I actually think of Marion and Vivian as girls' names themselves now.

Alex is quite an odd name in that it's neutral, but I don't think it automatically signifies masculine or feminine...I've always liked it, even though there were a few Alexes in my year (boys and girls). It has an X in it! A disproportionate amount of the Alexes I know now are gay so I actually think I associate it with that, more than anything else.

[koganbot]

The girl's name is usually spelled Alix, isn't it?

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Not really as far as i know (apart from our own Alix), it's usually short for Alexandra or Alexander.

Pirates!

[koganbot]

I wonder if the popularity of costume pictures back in the '20s, '30s, and '40s was because, at a time when long hair was not allowed on men, these movies allowed men to wear long hair. Google image search for Errol Flynn shows him in studio publicity stills in modern dress, but in longer hair for most of his actual roles.

[koganbot]

That is, Google image search for Errol Flynn shows him IN SHORT HAIR in studio publicity stills in modern dress, but in longer hair for most of his actual roles.

Shawn!

[koganbot]

Shawn! I think of it as another name that was formerly all-male (though I could be wrong*) that's now being colonized by women.

*In fact, singer-songwriter gal Shawn Colvin is 53, only a year younger than I am.

[justfanoe.livejournal.com]

Alex is the name of the (female) main character on the Disney show "Wizards of Waverly Place"

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Also there are those names which are girls' names here but boys' names in foreign eg Jan, Simone.

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

lytton (as a name) isn't that obviously gendered to me.

all the other tinies i know have sensible names (or at worst, complicated "oirish" spellings of sensible names)

[jauntyemma.livejournal.com]

What with being on a baby forum I get treated to the most depraved recesses of parent's minds when it comes to naming kids... having said that mostly names are pretty normal - there seems to be a real glut of Isabella / Isabelle / Annabellas though. I think the most outlandish one so far is Slade (I remember the lady in question asking what forum members thought of the name & I said it reminded me of Porridge but I think I am just an old person). Oh and a woman whose surname was Aitchison who wanted to call her kid Harley and there was great debate as to whether or not this sounded too much like Harley Davidson.

but can't think of any gender non specific ones that seem to be popular right now...

[katstevens.livejournal.com]

I know a lady called Gregg! She hates it for obv reasons and goes by her middle name instead (which I won't say here as I promised her I wouldn't tell anyone - oops, but is pretty androgynous in itself).

[piratemoggy.livejournal.com]

I know a girl called Vivian, which is obviously actually a man's name. That probably doesn't count, though.

There was a girl called Darcy at camp; I'm not sure whether that's just a misappropriated surname (and presumably after Darcey Bussel, anyway) more than a genderswap name. Also there was a boy called Nile, which I assumed at first was spelt Niall but obviously I am TOO WELSH. :0

Those crazy Murcans call their kids anything, innit. It was them what started all this genderswap madness, not that I honestly think it matters, obv. I always thought 'Hazel' would actually be quite a good boys' name and 'Ash' quite a good girls'.

[koganbot]

My ex-wife's youngest sister is Darcy - named after Lord Darcy. Leslie (me ex) herself was named after Leslie Howard, possibly. Leslie seems to have been a name that the girls stole from the boys, like Marion, though surely the latter was abandoned by boys 'cause it's a homonym with Marianne. I suspect that the gender drift in most things, not just names, will be towards the feminine, since that's what happens to binaries with a "strong" and "weak" sides such as "masculine-feminine": anything that makes the "strong" a bit less than 100% strong is a contaminant, so anything that isn't 100% masculine is feminine.

[koganbot]

So anyway, "Vivian" becomes a girl's name because its homophone is "Vivienne."

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Niall = Irish surely!

Names which began as misspellings: Imogen, Beyoncé.

[koganbot]

Dylan as a first name is mostly but not entirely male. Madison is all-female, though I'm damned if I know how it become a first-name at all. There's also a drift by class, from higher to lower (one of the few interesting parts of Freakonomics broke down names by class and race).

[alexmacpherson.livejournal.com]

Madison is just a surname-turned-forename, isn't it? Strange that it became feminine, maybe because of its similarity to girls' names like Madeleine.

Yeah that Freakonomics section on names was fascinating! Related, I remember hearing somewhere about two British schoolgirls in the '80s called Suraiya and Sharon - Sharon was ethnically Pakistani (her parents thought it'd be a safer name) while Suraiya was white (her parents thought it was a pretty name).

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

Apparently Madison was almost unknown-of as a girls' name before the movie Splash. There, Tom Hanks asks Daryl(!!) Hannah her name. She, being an ALIUM (sortof) without wanting to appear so, invents a name from a Madison Avenue streetsign, whereupon Tom protests that it's not actually a name! Less than 20 years later it was the 2nd most used girls' name in the US.

Note how I studiously avoided implying any causation in the above ahem.

KELLY!!!

[koganbot]

Kelly! Both male and female, though I think the drift is towards female. (I know a 14-year-old Kelly, a girl.)

[koganbot]

Cary and Carey used to be boy's names, though never that common. But since the rise of "Carrie," Cary and Carey have disapppeared. Jackie used to be a common boy's nickname for someone called John. Now it's only a girl's nickname. Lynn has disappeared as a boy's name. Don't think there are many boys named Francis anymore. (Not that many named Frank, either, for that matter. "Frank" is the name on my birth certificate, by the way.)

Interesting trend: girls' nicknames are tending to be less dimunitive. Jenn rather than Jenny as short for Jennifer. Sam rather than Sammy as short for Samantha. I wonder if there's a drop in boys being named Samuel because of this. Also, wonder if there's been a drop overall in boys using short nicknames: there were some names that were almost never used in full when I was growing up, at least among children: Richard, Nathan, Jonathan, Thomas, Edward, Alfred, Alexander, Michael, William, Andrew, Harold, Nicholas, Geoffrey, Jeffrey. Now the names are often in full (well, Harold is a name that's gone bye-bye). I know of a teen "Thomas" who's never been anything but Thomas, and a young Jonathan.

[koganbot]

As a youngster, I was puzzled how the male writer Joyce Cary could have two female names.

Stevies only love you when they're Steven

[koganbot]

Steven and Stephen should be on my list of boy's names never used in full among children in the '50s and '60s but that now sometimes get the full treatment. The rise of Stevie as a girl's nickname may parallel the decline of Stevie as a boy's nickname.

So, Jordan and Kelly

[koganbot]

So, right now Jordan and Kelly are the two that can both go masculine and feminine (I know a female Jordan in her mid twenties; her parents must have been pioneers). Kelly will probably be all female in a generation, whereas Jordan still has enough masculine strength so that it could hold on as the strongest gender variability.

Just saw a Leslie Cheung movie last night; he was my generation, gay, and, as it turned out, suicidally depressed. He chose the name "Leslie" himself.

Leslie Cheung says thank you to Monica

[koganbot]

[koganbot]

As Greg points out on my own LJ, there's...

TAYLOR!!!

[koganbot]

Dana. Shannon.

[anatol-merklich.livejournal.com]

Australia's got a new governor-general. Her name is Quentin.