Why name "Madison" so popular for girls?

[Laurence Horn]

At 11:28 AM -0500 3/25/04, Duane Campbell wrote:
>On Thu, 25 Mar 2004 07:04:27 -0800 James Smith
><jsmithjamessmith at YAHOO.COM> writes:
>
>>We finally
>>  got down to number 14 (for the 80's) with our third
>>  daughter, Megan, in 1981, but also caught that name on
>>  the way up, from 417 in the 60's to  84 in the 70's
>>  and up to number 10 in the 90's.
>
>We named our daughter, born in 1972, Megan. The name came from a novel I
>had read several years before which took place in 19th century Ireland.
>We had never known anyone named Megan and there was no pop culture
>influence. I clearly remember a nurse at the hospital mentioning what an
>unusual name it was. Of course, several of her classmates were named
>Megan. I have no idea where it came from.
>
Well, our daughter was born in 1984 and we spent a lot of time
leafing through a number of those what-shall-we-name-the-baby books
in search of the right M- name.  We settled on Meryl, partly because
it was so uncommon. (Two years earlier, we'd named our son David,
thereby instantiating the typical pattern of choosing more frequently
chosen names for sons than daughters.)  The only Meryl we knew of at
the time was Streep, but we didn't choose the name in her honor.
Since then, the name (for better or worse) has remained quite
uncommon and appears on none of those Social Security lists (nor has
it been duplicated on any class lists).  One price for this
uniqueness has been her having to respond to a lot more "how do you
spell that" questions than David has.

Larry Horn