Sure, lots of names drift in and out of popularity; but Jennifer was more than just a common baby name, it was a bona fide trend, a phenomenon. For a generation, it was almost impossible to walk into any grade-school classroom in North America without running into one — and probably two — girls named Jennifer, or Jenny or Jen.
And then one year the name just fell out of use. Its popularity didn’t waver, it plummeted faster than an optimistic stock market puffed out on subprime credit and never recovered.
Can't believe they didn't mention this little toy. Somewhere there's a nice writeup that explains this. It says that parents generally pick names that are a little different, but still very familiar. As such, certain names oscillate in spelling and related names. Something not mentioned in the article is that "Jennifer" has never been an unpopular name; as long as the census bureau has been tracking it it's been in the top 200.
If that’s the case, did my mother find a perfect name that just happened to coincide with a million other babies? Or did she merely have the illusion of choice? One doesn't imply the other. Even chaotic processes have boundaries. Just because a process can be described in general does not mean that the behavior of an individual component is non-random.The math behind this presents a troubling conclusion: that the popularity of any given baby name — just like any given pop song — is merely a mix of linguistically and culturally appropriate sounds, familiarity and mathematical processes.
Regarding Jennifer, I always had at least two, maybe three of them in my class growing up. I wonder if any of them ended up in the Jennifer support groups?
I remember a lot of Jennifers. But no more than John, Chris, or Alex.
For guys names, I've met a lot of "Nate's" and "Nathan's" throughout the years.
I've heard Muhammad is pretty popular as well :)
Ha, yes it is... But oddly enough I didn't meet many Mohammed's growing up in a small town in Michigan.