"Tristan" now feminine given name

[Wilson Gray]

My mother has a woman friend down home in Texas named "Johnnie." Back
in St. Louis, I had a male acquaintance whose first name was "Fay."
"Fay" was also used as a hypochoristic equivalent of "ofay." The poor
guy took a lot of ribbing, given that his ancestral line was probably
black back to Africa.

-Wilson


On 2/23/06, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM>
> Subject:      Re: "Tristan" now feminine given name
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> You mean to say that by a commodius vicus of recirculation, Allison is again a feminine name. Or still, as the case may be.
>
>   "Alysoun" is the name of the female lead in the "The Miller'sTale."  I've known several female "Allisons." (That was in the last century, however.)
>
>   And I once knew a female dental hygienist named "Johnnie."
>
>   JL
>
> James Callan <james.callan at COMCAST.NET> wrote:
>   ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender: American Dialect Society
> Poster: James Callan
> Subject: Re: "Tristan" now feminine given name
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> It's a longstanding trend for parents to give girls names that used to be masculine -- my wife, Allison, was named after her grandfather.
>
> A good Web resource that discusses naming trends, rather than just spotting them, is the Baby Name Wizard: http://www.babynamewizard.com/blog/
>
> There's an entry on the androgynous trend here (scroll down to the second post -- for some reason the direct link doesn't work): http://www.babynamewizard.com/blog/archive/2005_11_01_nameblog-archive.html
>
> It doesn't discuss Tristan itself, but if you plug the name into the site's Java-based NameVoyager, you'll see that it's never been a top-1000 boy's name in the US, hit the girl's list at #819 in the 1970s, shot to #218 in the 1980s, #148 in the 1990s, and was #116 in 2004. That translates to over 800 babies per million born in the US being given the name.
>
> James Callan
> neologasm.com
>
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