Another scary thought: Since Reagan and Kennedy are now established as semi-normal girls’ names, does that mean that we will soon begin hearing about girls named Clinton, Bush, or Obama?!?
The name that has really gotten a bump in the Middle East in the last ten years is Osama, not Obama. While Clinton, like Reagan, Kennedy, and Carter, already existed as a given name before the president was ever elected, nobody is going to name their child “Bush” as a first name, and Obama is a rare name in Africa. I would not be surprised if Barack gets more of a bump than George, Bill, or Ronald did, though.
At any rate, I know a couple that named their boy Carter, and trust me, it was meant as no homage to the president of that name!!
Most of the names that are en vogue today are absolutely horrible.
Mason, Jayden, Braden, Aiden, Madison, Addison, and the absolute worst offender: REAGAN. In all its forms. Reagan was a great president but an absolutely horrendous first name and not feminine in any way.
I guess my kids names stand out but in retro ways and in very Catholic ways. I think I’ve hit the mark.
St. Aidan is an Irish saint, founder and first bishop of the monastery on the island of Lindisfarne in England. A Christian missionary, he is credited with restoring Christianity to Northumbria after the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain. He was known throughout the kingdom for his knowledge of the Bible, his learning, his eloquent preaching, his holiness, his distaste for pomp, his kindness to the poor, and the miracles attributed to him. If any Catholic boys named Aiden or Aidan aren’t familiar with this saint, it would be a shame.
Bl. John Mason was an English layman, hanged, drawn and quartered in 1591 for the crime of giving harbor to a Catholic priest, a priest who was later canonized St. Edmund Gennings. Pope Pius XI beatified Mason in 1929. Again: any child named Mason ought be to made familiar with this saintly layperson.
Many of the rest are surnames or variants on surnames. For instance, Madison can come either as a variant on Madeline (St. Mary Magdalene) or from “Matty’s son”…that is, a son of a guy named Matthew who had been nicknamed “Matty”. Addison, from son of Adam, and so on. Giving the mother’s maiden surname as a child’s middle name has a long history. As others have pointed out, Regan was considered a name believable for a princess in Shakespeare’s time. Granted, the older sister in the story was named Goneril, so maybe the playwright was implying that ol’ King Lear had some mental lapses earlier in his life, too. (Maybe the king went a little nuts when his child was again a princess and not a prince?
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Don’t get me wrong, we chose saints’ names for our own kids that would have been considered average boys’ names 50 years ago and 100 years ago, on the theory that timeless names aren’t so likely to become “old guy” names later in their life. I think it reasonable to expect all of these two-syllable names ending in “-en” to become “old guy” names some day.
Whether the names are “secular” or not, though, that also depends on whether the parents trouble themselves to let their child know that he or she has a patron saint. On top of that, there are things beyond our control when it comes to these things. They may have brought her up very vigilantly, but I think don’t Madonna Louise Veronica Ciccone’s parents could have known what secular meanings their daughter would later give to her own given name. Some things, a parent can’t do much about.
