Remember the jeans you wore in the early 1990s? Those high-waisted cuts gave way to hipsters, which spawned low-rise, then ultra low-rise, leaving nowhere to go but back up. So it is with fashionable names, which incrementally morph into new monikers, according to Stanley Lieberson, a Harvard sociologist and author of A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions and Culture Change.
Lieberson argues that syllables within names spread like memes, attaching themselves to other syllables to launch new names or trends. Consider the terminal "a" in girls' names such as Brianna or Hannah. There were six female names ending in "a" on the top-twenty list in 1990, nine in 1997 and eleven in 2002. Lieberson calls this slow rise in popularity the "ratchet effect." He argues that such change is not necessarily influenced by social context, such as characters or stars in film or TV.
Take the name Marilyn, already popular before Marilyn Monroe's career took off in the early 1950s (the name was ranked 29th among girls born in the 1940s). It dropped to 56th place in the 1950s and to 139th place in the 1960s. Had more babies been named Marilyn after Monroe rose to stardom, we might have attributed this to her beauty. Instead, we can now speculate that people may not have wanted to name their daughter after a sexpot.
