Re.: Brittany and other names...

[Laurence Horn]

>I have never seen the movie Splash (and don't plan to!).  And I know most of
>the people I would ask who have children named Madison would never say they
>used it because of Splash.  It is a theory though!  Started because of that
>movie, and then actually caught on several years later?  Which year's list
>is it in second place on?

In 2001, according to the web site we were told about earlier today,

http://www.ssa.gov/cgi-bin/babynames.cgi

You'll find these figures, which I hope are readable.  I haven't
tried to reformat them, so just in case, Madison's 21946 is second to
Emily's 24850 and just above Hannah's 20434.  The boys' names have a
lot more votes, suggesting that (unless there were 8000 more boys
than girls born in 2001) there's a lot more diversity (i.e.
fragmentation) for the girls' names.

1
                                                         Jacob

32101

Emily

24850
                                    2
                                                       Michael

29655

Madison

21946
                                    3
                                                       Matthew

26447

Hannah

20434
                                    4
                                                        Joshua

25950

Ashley

16409
                                    5
                                                    Christopher

23149

Alexis

16190
                                    6
                                                       Nicholas

22599

Samantha

15706
                                    7
                                                       Andrew

22178

Sarah

15667
                                    8
                                                        Joseph

21878

Abigail

14687
                                    9
                                                        Daniel

20895

Elizabeth

14582
                                   10
                                                       William

19979

Jessica

13790

>  (That movie must have come out at the latest in
>1987 or so?)  I certainly don't hear it in teenagers so far, just in
>children under about 10.
>
1984.  So yes, there was a time lag, but that's the theory I've
heard.  (The video was released in 1996, so maybe that explains some
of it.)  And Daryl Hannah has just one R in her first name, contra my
previous posting. Luckily, that doesn't matter, since all the 42,380
girls are named either Madison or Hannah, not Dar(r)yl.   Here's
something relevant, although the indicated link appears to be dead:
==========
"The 1984 comedy "Splash," directed by Ron Howard and staring Tom
Hanks and Daryl Hannah, was very loosely based on Hans Christian
Anderson's timeless tale "The Little Mermaid." The film was a
resounding success, due not only to its clever script, but also to
the fact that Darryl Hannah spent a good deal of the movie partially
naked. The movie's humor and wit appealed to the audience that it
could not reach through hormonal stimuli, and it encouraged a faddish
following to develop around Madison (Darryl Hannah), the film's
mermaid star."

        --The Popular Culture Page

        http://www.engsoc.carleton.ca/~wsitch/projects/mermaids/pop-cult.html
============
Presumably the faddish followers turned into parents somewhere down the line.

This link,
http://babynamer.storkavenue.com/top_5_states_girls_2001.html, gives
a tabular form of most popular girls' names by state, and it's clear
that in many of them, especially in the South and Great Plains,
Hannah and Madison ran 1-2 in one order or the other.  In fact, a
short piece by the excellent Robert Krulwich on ABC World News
Tonight a couple of months ago ran a map of the U.S. in which the
Madison states were colored red and the Emily states were blue, very
much mirroring the 2000 Bush-Gore race (I guess other names were
suppressed for the sake of the argument).

larry