New English (?) name: Jhan

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:39 PM -0400 3/21/11, William Palmer wrote:
>
>As to women's names which were formerly masculine, my impression is that
>once the first girl gets a boy's name, no boy is ever given that name again.
>Examples are too numerous to list....Kelly, Madison, Shannon, Beverly, Kay,
>Vivian, ad infinitum.
>
This is frequently maintained (I'm sure longer ago than in Miller &
Swift's _Words and Women_, 1977) and the general tendency is real,
but it can't be as absolute or complete as you (and others) claim.
There are a lot of names, Kelly among them but also Robin, Chris,
Tracy, Sandy, Alex, Sam, Drew, Dana, Kim, Pat, Leslie, Lee, Jody,
Jay(e), etc., etc., that have long been in use for both males and
females without the instant "depreciation" suggested by such claims.
To be sure, several of these are hypocoristics whose full forms
(Christine/Christopher, Patrick/Patricia) are non-epicene, while
others may be spelled differently according to sex of referent (the
-i forms of Terri, Sandi, and Jodi I think are female-only, but the
-y forms can go either way).  And some are epicene regionally, like
my own name--I grew up as Laurie (for a character in _Little Women_)
and only became Larry when I was trying to survive Junior High
School, yet male Lauries abound in Scotland and even Canada.

LH

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