{"text":[[{"start":7.03,"text":"You may remember those stories from a few years back about how there were more men called John running big companies than there were women. At the Financial Times, we had our own version: at one point in the economics and public policy zone of our office, there were more Sarahs than there were men."}],[{"start":26.86,"text":"But while such comparisons are intended to highlight gender diversity (or the lack of it) they raise another question too: why do some names become so popular at certain moments in time?"}],[{"start":42.01,"text":"First names are of great interest to academics because they are, as one research paper puts it, “essentially unconstrained individual choices, shorn of commercial interest”. This makes them a remarkable source of data about how culture and taste change over time."}],[{"start":61.339999999999996,"text":"According to a historical database of English birth records compiled by academics at the University of Edinburgh, more than 8 per cent of baby boys were named John in the mid-19th century (similar to the proportion of baby girls named Mary). It was a less dominant, but still very common, baby name by the 1940s and 1950s (which explains all those ageing chief executives called John in the 2010s)."}],[{"start":null,"text":"
"}],[{"start":92.32,"text":"But since then, its popularity has plummeted. Indeed, John is no longer even in the top 100 baby boy names. Other non-anglophone countries have experienced similar trends: in Norway, Anna and Ole were the most popular names at the end of the 19th century, accounting for about 10 and 7 per cent respectively of baby girls and boys, yet they are no longer so dominant."}],[{"start":123.46,"text":"A simple tale of the decline of custom and changing demographics, you might say. The top three boys’ names in England and Wales are now Muhammad, Noah and Oliver. But not all popular 19th-century names have gone the way of John. Some have staged a revival — and Sarah is a perfect example."}],[{"start":147.04999999999998,"text":"Sarah was a common name in mid-19th-century England, but its decline came sharper and faster than John, and by the first half of the 20th century it was a fairly unusual name to give a baby. And yet, in the 1970s and 1980s, it staged a remarkable comeback, shooting up the rankings to become one of the most popular girls’ names. That explains why there are so many Sarahs at the FT, 40 years later, of course (and why I have so many friends called Sarah that some people just call me “Soc”.)"}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":185.19,"text":"Why do some old names enjoy a “second act”? Experts say that first, they need to have been unpopular for a couple of generations, so that they appeal to parents of new babies who are looking for tradition but don’t want names they associate with their parents’ or grandparents’ era. Sarah, for example, is surely now doomed to have a 100-year hiatus as a victim of its own “second wind” success. As one person on Reddit put it, Sarah is now seen as an “aggressively ordinary” name (ouch)."}],[{"start":219.23,"text":"On top of that, the sounds in a name have to appeal to the current generation of parents, according to Anna Powell-Smith, one of the authors of the University of Edinburgh research. At the moment, soft-sounding names with lots of vowels are popular: Olivia, Amelia, and so on. The name Emma is an interesting example: it has fashionable sounds, and has indeed become very popular in the US. But in the UK, it is much less popular today, presumably because it was too common in the 1970s and 80s."}],[{"start":null,"text":""}],[{"start":258.52,"text":"Even if names like Sarah and John stage another comeback one day, they’re unlikely to ever achieve the levels of popularity they once commanded. The data shows that the drive towards individualism has increased in recent decades: the diversity of names has grown, and the most popular names aren’t anywhere near as popular in absolute terms as they were in previous generations. Names also cycle in and out of fashion faster. Rebecca Gregory, an assistant professor in historical linguistics at the University of Nottingham, told me that could partly be explained by globalisation, social media, and access to pop culture around the world. “There are so many more sources [of name ideas] available,” she said."}],[{"start":308.15,"text":"It is also possible that the timely publication of baby name data is beginning to shape the trends too. It might enable parents to realise more quickly when a name has become very popular, for example — and to choose one further down the list instead."}],[{"start":324.89,"text":"In other words, to have a really common name is likely to become less and less common. And to have a name so “aggressively ordinary” that you were at one point surrounded by women at work who had the same one? To future generations, that might seem very extraordinary indeed."}],[{"start":353.15,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1759995791_4463.mp3"}