I’m seeing this so many times… Like Aiden, Caiden, Braiden, Jaiden, Paiden…
There’s a well-studied phenomenon called “social diffusion”. People of higher socioeconomic status seek out novel, unique, or fashionable baby names and start using them. These names gradually get picked up by families of lower socioeconomic status. Eventually the names become mainstream, and then finally decline in popularity.
Okayden
This deserves way more upvotes.
Edit>> Come on, you can do better than 6 downvotes.
We could, but we don’t want to.
Social diffusion is an explanation of how information spreads, not just names.
My understanding is that unique names and neologism have long been a feature of African-American culture where North American Caucasians followed a family naming tradition. I think what has happened is some celebrities have moved towards a unique name scheme. But it feels like a mainstreaming of AA culture more than anything.
The impetus has been there in Europe. Many nations have/had very restrictive rules about names. They’d only have rules against it if people were trying to do it. I had Swiss friends who were very excited that their daughter was born in Canada so they could name her “Sora” which wasn’t in the approved name list in Switzerland.
“Approved name list”? What the actual fuck?
Lol. Check out Denmark. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naming_law
Aiden is tradition Gaelic and it means “fire”. Caiden is also Gaelic meaning “battle” Braiden is Gaelic meaning “salmon” Jayden is Hebrew for “God will judge” Hayden is old English meaning “hedged valley”
I’d like to see your source for those. I don’t know Gaelic so I can’t fact check those ones, but I do know a bit of Hebrew, and names that mean ‘God X’ usually end in el, not en. Also, Hebrew doesn’t have an English J sound, it has the IPA J sound though, or English Y sound. The Hebrew word for judge is ‘shofet’.
So I’m guessing it’s a combination of dun/den/tun etc being a common suffix in a lot of historical languages, and ‘ei’ being an extremely common diphthong worldwide just… leading to a lot of similar-sounding names that also converge in spelling in modern English?
Unique names and spellings became popular in the US during the 70s as part of the Black Power movement. The politically conscious black parents didn’t want to name their children European names, for some reason. The problem is that these black parents had no cultural link to Africa because that had been stolen from them.
Fist came Arab names. I presume this has to do with the NOI and the black celebrities who converted to it. Some of these names are still popular like Omar and Jamal. Of course Black Americans have no more connection to Islam than they do to Christianity, So black parents just started making new names for their children.
American popular culture tends to incubate in the black community and slowly drift into white culture. So it has gone with the unique baby names.
Maiden, Raiden
Hayden
What’s with your name, buzz?
Ah, a lesser known Daft Punk song.
Those are the names given to the children of all the teenagers I knew who got pregnant in my high school, so they always just remind me of teen pregnancy.
I feel all wrong now because you decided not to list the first three in alphabetic order.
Meanwhile, in Utah, a pair of new parents are becoming really charmed by the idea of ‘Brexit’ as a name for their next child.
This has all happened before and it will all happen again.
I understand the pushback against names like this, and concern for kids receiving these names, but I think it is misdirected. Ya, sure, maybe sometimes the name is literally made up, or in other cases has multiple variations on a theme, but anyone with immigration in their ancestry can tell you that naming conventions do not always move well to other countries. In the USA, we have multiple spellings for names like Muhammed and Dermitt because of this. I don’t see why this is a big deal and think it potentially enriches culture.
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Some of these parents need their head examined
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just a naming trend. it will phase out given some time.
Here are my two sons Aiden and Abettin.
