Baby names

From the June issue Atlantic Monthly, which I think actually arrived in April (!), comes this commentary on baby names. A study of more than 16 million babies born and named in California since 1961 produced these lists of names given to Caucasian babies that are associated with high and low levels of mother income and education.

Income. Here they apparently take the highest income moms and the lowest income moms, and look at name popularity in each group.

Girls/High: Alexandra, Lauren, Katherine, Madison, Rachel.
Girls/Low: Amber, Heather, Kayla, Stephanie, Alyssa.
Boys/High: Benjamin, Samuel, Jonathan, Alexander, Andrew.
Boys/Low: Cody, Brandon, Anthony, Justin, Robert.

Education. They did this differently, averaging years of education for each name, and then listing the names that had the highest and lowest corresponding levels of education (thus, more obscure names).

Girls/High: Lucienne, Marie-Claire, Glynnis, Adair, Meira.
Girls/Low: Angel, Heaven, Misty, Destiny, Brenda.
Boys/High: Dov, Akiva, Sander, Yannick, Sacha.
Boys/Low: Ricky, Joey, Jessie, Jimmy, Billy.

I have never in my life met anyone with any of the last 20 names as their real, legal, name (other than Brenda), though I've known people legally named Tommy and Danny (and I named a pet rabbit Angel). I've actually never even heard of anyone named Meira or Dov, and the only Yannick I'm aware of is the French-African tennis star... I guess the point here is that in California, some of the highly educated Jews and/or Francophiles are giving their babies names almost no one else is using. However mundane the underlying reasons, the results are amusing.