Names

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Names | 27 August 2015

We reached peak Charlie in 2012, when 5,571 baby boys were given the name. There were only 4,642 last year. Perhaps the Paris massacre early this year will leave more infants than ever lisping ‘Je suis Charlie’ when they learn to talk. Names go in waves. In the Office for National Statistics list of last year’s names in England and Wales, diminutives are noticeably popular. Charlie, not Charles, is at No. 5 for boys, with Harry, not Henry, at No. 3 and Jack, not John, at No. 2. The tendency is less pronounced among girls, with the tenth most popular name being Sophie, though Lily (ninth) and Poppy (fifth) sound like diminutives. Of

Thursday

The Spectator

Barometer | 20 August 2015

No sex, please Several friends of the late Sir Edward Heath asserted that he could not be guilty of sexually assaulting children because he was asexual. How many adults do not experience sexual attraction? — A 2004 study by Anthony F. Bogaert, of Brock University, Ontario, Canada, analysed responses to a British questionnaire ten years earlier. Of 18,000 respondents, 195, or just over 1%, had agreed with the statement ‘I have never felt sexually attracted to anyone at all’. — A 1983 study by a student at the University of Michigan classified 5% of males and 10% of females as asexual. Unaccountable spending The EU declined to offer a breakdown

Tuesday

Ross Clark

Muhammad really is the single most popular boys’ name in England and Wales

Why doesn’t the Office of National Statistics want us to know that Mohammed is the most popular boys’ name in England and Wales?  Yesterday, it put out its annual survey of the top 10 baby’s names.  In 2014, it reported, the most popular boys’ names were Oliver, Jack and Harry. This contrasts somewhat with a similar survey by the website BabyCentre last December which claimed that the most popular boys’ name was now Mohammed. When that survey was reported in the Daily Mail it was jumped upon by various left-wing ‘fact-checker’ websites who denounced the survey as an abuse of statistics. Not only were the figures based only on respondents

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Matajudíos

A village has changed its name because it seemed offensive. But I think the villagers were under a misapprehension. The village is in Spain: Castrillo Matajudíos. Of its population of 57, 29 voted to change the name to Castrillo Mota de Judíos because they did not like the idea of the former name meaning ‘Kill Jews’. Another settlement, in Extremadura, is called Valle de Matamoros, but its inhabitants are not planning to change it lest it be taken to urge the killing of Moors. The silly thing is that the Spanish place-name element mata does not mean ‘kill’ at all. It is quite common. There is a quiet little place

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

A radical guide to boosting your baby’s ‘brand individuality’

A Telegraph journalist, Lucy Denyer, has written about how rubbish it is that people are calling their children stupid, made-up names. (Spoiler alert: I’m anti stupid made-up names.) Trouble is, while she hasn’t exactly gone the Fifi Trixibelle/Peaches route herself, she has called her son Atticus. And no, it’s not the friend of Cicero she had in mind; it’s the bloke from To Kill a Mockingbird. Difficult one, Atticus. Classical names like Titus, Marcus or Octavia do dangerously expose your child’s class background, increasing their chances of getting beaten up. On the other hand, I’m all in favour of Cornelius, which is obviously from the Acts of the Apostles, and was formerly a

Thursday

Dot Wordsworth

Charlotte

It could have been much worse. Someone had pointed out that among the new baby’s ancestors was Queen Violant of Hungary, which would make a splendid name. If that sounds unlikely for a possible queen of the United Kingdom, the wee princess might have been the victim of a suggested cross-cultural gesture by being given the name Fatima, since the present Queen and her heirs are descended from Mohammed through his daughter. Such descent is not unusual, though in this case there are obscurities in the early generations and in later Spanish genealogical connections. Leaving that aside, the name Fatima is also used by Catholics, who take it from the

Thursday

Nicky Haslam

Nicky Haslam’s diary: Marie-Anna Berta Felicie Johanna Ghislaine Theodora Huberta Georgina Helene Genoveva and other big names

I was once bundled into a police car in Palm Springs to explain why I didn’t have snow-tyres on my pick-up in the red-hot California desert. I don’t remember the outcome of the ‘arraignment’, but will never forget the lady cop’s name, L. Nevada Yonkers. Other weird names have stuck with me. Reading The Most of Nora Ephron, whom I met once and immediately fell in love with, I realised that when I was working on Vogue in New York in the 1960s, she had been on the staff of Newsweek. I used to be obsessed by the weird names of the girls on Newsweek’s masthead. I would reel them

Thursday

Deborah Ross

The joy of cemeteries

The idea of writing Finding the Plot: 100 Graves to Visit Before You Die first came to Ann Treneman when she was chatting with Tony Wright, formerly Labour MP for Cannock Chase. They started talking about Birmingham and she happened to remark: ‘Did you know the man who invented Cluedo came from Bromsgrove?’ His name, rather marvellously, was Anthony E. Pratt, and she’d previously written about him for the Independent. Pratt had allowed the patent to lapse before the board game took off, and had died in obscurity (although with Alzheimer’s, in an old people’s home, rather than with lead piping, in the library). She’d found his grave (absolutely fascinating;

Thursday

The Spectator

Letters: On quitting Facebook, and putting down Nigel

Why we joined Sir: I was astonished by the assertion made by Wyn Grant (Letters, 21 September) that ‘the postwar surge in Conservative party membership was due to people rebuilding their social lives after the war’. Where did that idea come from? I grew up in south London before and during the war. I recall that social contact increased during the war and friendships made then endured when the war was over. Of course the nature of social activities gradually changed after the war, but the suggestion that most people joined the Conservative party purely for social reasons is wrong. It should be remembered that the Labour party’s clause 4 was central