Appellation Mountain‘s Abby Sandel looks at some of the new baby names to make the headlines this week–with several surprises.

Being a name nerd used to be hard work.

Do you remember paging through lists of Olympic medalists in the paper, gazing at name plaques in art museums, seeking out family trees in history books at the library?  Did you know exactly which days the local paper ran birth announcements?

Then you must be a thirty-something or better name nerd.

I borrowed my mother’s only baby name book and kept it on my bookshelf, between Sweet Valley High and Nancy Drew.  I read it obsessively, even the small print listing nicknames and foreign variants.  That long lost book is where I fell in love with Libby and Nan, Katrinka and Alexei.

So many stories about twenty-first century baby naming trends are dismissive.  They claim parents are trying too hard for their children to stand out and be unique.

Maybe that happens some of the time, but to me it seems straightforward.

With access to all of these fabulous names, why wouldn’t we consider a wider range of possibilities?

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