61–70 of 159 posts
As a man named “Lyndsy”, this is interesting :) I know much of the story of my name. I’m named after my great-grandfather, with first and middle names reversed. His middle name was “Lindsey”, after his grandmother’s maiden name. (... and back and back and back ...) I named my eldest daughter Lynzy, to continue the tradition. I’ve apologized for her having to go through life with a “boy’s name” :)
As a man named “Lyndsy”, this is interesting :) I know much of the story of my name. I’m named after my great-grandfather, with first and middle names reversed. His middle name was “Lindsey”, after his grandmother’s maiden name. (... and back and back and back ...) I named my eldest daughter Lynzy, to continue the tradition. I’ve apologized for her having to go through life with a “boy’s name” :)
And that's why I always ask patients how to spell their name, no matter how common it sounds...
At the risk of turning an innocent topic into a political discussion, I wonder how much of this trend can be explained by societal privilege. Ie, parents (consciously or subconsciously) want their daughters to benefit from appearing male (at least on paper) and so give them ambiguous or masculine names. And of course, the same parents would do the exact opposite for their sons, by not selecting any name that might be…
Is that really a thing in the US though?
As a man named “Lyndsy”, this is interesting :) I know much of the story of my name. I’m named after my great-grandfather, with first and middle names reversed. His middle name was “Lindsey”, after his grandmother’s maiden name. (... and back and back and back ...) I named my eldest daughter Lynzy, to continue the tradition. I’ve apologized for her having to go through life with a “boy’s name” :)
At the risk of turning an innocent topic into a political discussion, I wonder how much of this trend can be explained by societal privilege. Ie, parents (consciously or subconsciously) want their daughters to benefit from appearing male (at least on paper) and so give them ambiguous or masculine names. And of course, the same parents would do the exact opposite for their sons, by not selecting any name that might be…
I have a friend who did exactly this, giving his daughter a gender neutral name to help her avoid discrimination. It makes a lot of sense to me and would guess this is not uncommon. It also reminds of a study I read about a while back where the researches tried sending out resumes that were all identical except that half had very common names and half had names that are more commonly African American. Probably unsurp…
>To manipulate perception of race, each resume is assigned either a very African American sounding name or a very White sounding name. The results show significant discrimination against African-American names: White names receive 50 percent more callbacks for interviews. We also find that race affects the benefits of a better resume. For White names, a higher quality resume elicits 30 percent more callbacks whereas for African Americans, it elicits a far smaller increase.
At the risk of turning an innocent topic into a political discussion, I wonder how much of this trend can be explained by societal privilege. Ie, parents (consciously or subconsciously) want their daughters to benefit from appearing male (at least on paper) and so give them ambiguous or masculine names. And of course, the same parents would do the exact opposite for their sons, by not selecting any name that might be…
Think Patrick vs Patricia, Jesse vs Jessica, Robert vs Roberta etc. It seems a lot of the gender switching names started as short forms of longer names, but then just became full names. Eg Bobby, Jackie, Jessie.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps in the 70s people also stuck to the general trend of female names ending with a vowel while make names typically ended with a consonant. Immigration from cultures such as India where this isn't the trend might indeed be responsible for it waning.
In latin countries male names end in o, and girls names end in a.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Different language families. It is/was feminine in the Latin world, and masculine, related to germanic Arne, in some pockets of Western Europe [Frisia, Scotland, France]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne
I was thinking the same thing wrt to Jean (french) vs English Jean. Or Ariel (Hebrew).
At the risk of turning an innocent topic into a political discussion, I wonder how much of this trend can be explained by societal privilege. Ie, parents (consciously or subconsciously) want their daughters to benefit from appearing male (at least on paper) and so give them ambiguous or masculine names. And of course, the same parents would do the exact opposite for their sons, by not selecting any name that might be…
Is that really a thing in the US though?
At the risk of turning an innocent topic into a political discussion, I wonder how much of this trend can be explained by societal privilege. Ie, parents (consciously or subconsciously) want their daughters to benefit from appearing male (at least on paper) and so give them ambiguous or masculine names. And of course, the same parents would do the exact opposite for their sons, by not selecting any name that might be…