Why name "Madison" so popular for girls?

[Beverly Flanigan]

"Megan" is also variously spelled, I've noticed, sometimes with an 'h' (as
Meghan) and sometimes not.  I don't know if there's a correlation with the
tendency to lax the front vowel or not, but I always have to ask my
students, "Do you say [meg at n] or [mEg at n]?"  And then I have to explain why
I asked the question, which leads into phonetics and a nice lesson on IPA.

At 02:38 PM 3/25/2004 -0500, you wrote:
>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