Brand naming kids

[Laurence Horn]

At 6:36 AM -0800 3/29/04, Dave Wilton wrote:
>As for another name, my mother is named "Shirley," and my grandparents
>absolutely insisted that unlike all those other "Shirleys" of her
>generation, she was *not* named after Shirley Temple. In many (most?) cases
>I don't think that children are directly named after such celebrities. The
>name is just "in the air" and the parents like the sound of it.
>
>--Dave Wilton
>   dave at wilton.net
>   http://www.wilton.net

I can support this claim from my own experience in selecting "Meryl"
for my daughter's name in '84, as previously noted.  There is, of
course, a continuum between "X was named after Y" and "X was named
partly as a result of the name being in the air through the celebrity
of Y".  In fact, the post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc evolution of the
expression "to be named after" underlines this.

Larry Horn