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Help[Opinions] Re: Trendy or Dated?
in reply to a message by Sound Of Silence
Trendy is worse, because trendy names will be dated. Some names that are considered dated often sound quite offbeat or like family names. I know of two little girls named Cheryl and Nancy, and while those names are a bit dated, they're 1000 times better than trendy names like Makayla or Jaidyn or anything kr8ive or invented.
I guess I always see trendy names as people with the pack mentality, parents name their kids the trendy names so they'll be the popular, cool kids. I'd rather see a kid with a dated name that atleast shows the parents can think for themselves and choose a name they like, not just follow the crowd.
I guess I always see trendy names as people with the pack mentality, parents name their kids the trendy names so they'll be the popular, cool kids. I'd rather see a kid with a dated name that atleast shows the parents can think for themselves and choose a name they like, not just follow the crowd.
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Whoa.
"Pack mentality"?
Parents choose names, by and large, based on what they like. Not so their kids will be popular or cool. Nor so their kids will fit in with the rich white crowd... or appear to be bluebloods ... or show off how well-educated they are .. or whatever else it could be that motivates people to like traditional, or well-used, or used by the well-to-do names. I mean, people just pick a name they like, and they think about whether their kid will be rejected based on the name -- and they base their judgment on whether or not they themselves, or their peers (people they relate to) would reject it. Beyond that, they can't truly know how it "fits in."
Parents who choose "dated" or non-trendy names in general are just as conformist, if not more so, in their own way, as parents who prefer trendy names.
What you perceive as a pack mentality is, I think, just the tendency of people in different subcultures to simultaneously like the same pool of names. There's a Makayla & Jaiden subculture who probably all thought they were original, just like they think it's somehow original to name a girl Tyler or Taylor. And there's also a subculture that chooses names from what they think of as more high-brow culture: the names used by their great great grandparents, or names of famous people from antique times, or names from literature, etc... they suffer trends too! I came here a couple years ago thinking I was the only one who could like a name like Violet. Ha! It's already been used by a celebrity and folks here just LURVE it. We're all under the same influences, and what comes out as our "taste" can look a lot like deliberate efforts to conform.
Both kinds of naming could cynically be seen as mere striving to impress those in one's own group... that doesn't apply more to the trendies than it does to the traditionalists.
- chazda, defensively because I can't think of a single name that doesn't appear to follow someone's trend nor bow to someone else's standard of good enough. Except the ones that make most all people (including me) say, "Please don't inflict that on a child." Which include both too-dated and too-trendy names.
"Pack mentality"?
Parents choose names, by and large, based on what they like. Not so their kids will be popular or cool. Nor so their kids will fit in with the rich white crowd... or appear to be bluebloods ... or show off how well-educated they are .. or whatever else it could be that motivates people to like traditional, or well-used, or used by the well-to-do names. I mean, people just pick a name they like, and they think about whether their kid will be rejected based on the name -- and they base their judgment on whether or not they themselves, or their peers (people they relate to) would reject it. Beyond that, they can't truly know how it "fits in."
Parents who choose "dated" or non-trendy names in general are just as conformist, if not more so, in their own way, as parents who prefer trendy names.
What you perceive as a pack mentality is, I think, just the tendency of people in different subcultures to simultaneously like the same pool of names. There's a Makayla & Jaiden subculture who probably all thought they were original, just like they think it's somehow original to name a girl Tyler or Taylor. And there's also a subculture that chooses names from what they think of as more high-brow culture: the names used by their great great grandparents, or names of famous people from antique times, or names from literature, etc... they suffer trends too! I came here a couple years ago thinking I was the only one who could like a name like Violet. Ha! It's already been used by a celebrity and folks here just LURVE it. We're all under the same influences, and what comes out as our "taste" can look a lot like deliberate efforts to conform.
Both kinds of naming could cynically be seen as mere striving to impress those in one's own group... that doesn't apply more to the trendies than it does to the traditionalists.
- chazda, defensively because I can't think of a single name that doesn't appear to follow someone's trend nor bow to someone else's standard of good enough. Except the ones that make most all people (including me) say, "Please don't inflict that on a child." Which include both too-dated and too-trendy names.
This message was edited 2/22/2006, 6:19 PM
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I just have to comment on the above, because Cheryl is an invented name; it's just a name that was invented 100 years ago instead of a decade ago. I don't have any reliable records of women named Cheryl before about 1900, and it was a big booming trendy name in the 1940s, coming out of nowhere to be extremely popular. People who named their daughters Cheryl in the 1940s and 1950s could have been just as easily accused of having a "pack mentality" and giving their daughter a "trendy" name as people today who name their daughters Madison, Kaylee, Mackenzie, or Destiny are.
If you now accept Cheryl as being a perfectly good though "dated" name, the chances are that 70 years from now most people will have exactly the same feelings about presently popular recent inventions such as Jaden, Caden, Makayla, Makenna, etc.
If you now accept Cheryl as being a perfectly good though "dated" name, the chances are that 70 years from now most people will have exactly the same feelings about presently popular recent inventions such as Jaden, Caden, Makayla, Makenna, etc.
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