2012 baby names

I once worked a Baby Expo with a friend of mine and drove her mental counting the number of twins I saw. There were an extraordinary amount of them there but she didn't really seem to care as much as I did.

I think I'm a frustrated statistician.

And on that, allow me to drive you nuts with my ongoing fascination with baby names. These are the names of all the baba's I know born in 2012.

Trips! Jack, Olivia, Alexander
Twins! Zack & Lily-Mae
Henry
Zia (boy)
Ines
Luca

And within a week:
Faolan
Jasper
Winter (girl)

Jackson
Charlotte
Ayla
Charlie (boy)
Bennett (cousin to Charlie)
Isabella

Lila
Alexander (cousin to Charlie & Bennett!)
Arya

21 babies! Just under 50% girls this year though, better than last year's figures.

And so here's the Baby Center's (USA) list of 100 Most Popular Baby Names for the year, and here are the Baby Centre's (UK) lists - boys and girls.
And here's my deeply scientific analysis ...

6 of the names above appear on the American lists, 9 on the UK lists, showing once again, but not as conclusively as before, that South Africans seem to tend to follow English trends more closely.
That said, there's far more overlap on the US and UK lists then there was last year.
Fascinating stuff. No?

Oh, no.

naming (and unrelated shaming)

Do you remember that stage in your life when everyone was turning 21 and you seemed to have a 21st birthday party every other weekend? Each one of them a good excuse to dress up, over-indulge, throw name, snog the birthday person's younger sibling, throw up, total someone's dad's car and declare it the 'best night ever'. Until a couple of weeks later when you did it all again.

Do you remember when everyone was getting married and you seemed to have a wedding every couple of months? Each one a good excuse to dress up (in my case this round involved less 2nd hand hippy crap and more seconds store 'designer' labels), over-indulge, REALLY throw name (often in front of aged aunties), snog any number of people, throw up, total your own car and declare it the 'best wedding ever'. Until the next one ...

Well now I'm in a stage of life where everyone is having babies, which doesn't really provide opportunity for some of the wildness described above (except for a couple of the more adventurous baby showers), but does give me an excuse to indulge in a bit of scientific analysis (cough).

Actually I just like making lists really.

Here's the names of all the babies I personally know who were born in 2011:

Iona

Alex

Cameron

Zuka

Sashin

Katie

Leo

Isaac

Juno

Harrison

Leah (two Leah’s actually!)

Adam

Christopher

Stavros

Sam

Aune

Wian

Liam

18 babies! That's not counting the one's I know of from the blogosphere or friend's of friends. And only 6 girls ... 2011 was definitely the year of the boy in my circles.

So on to the science.
Okay, it's not really science, I just picked up on the 100 Top Baby Name lists floating around and compared them to the list above. I used the Baby CentER (USA) and Baby CentRE (UK) lists and deduced the following:
Only 1 name on the above list appears on the American list, in comparison to 8 names from the UK list.
Ergo, people I know are not that concerned with popular trends when it comes to baby names, but where there are overlaps, they (mainly South Africans) still lean more towards British trends than American.
Lank interesting no?

No? Sigh.

Can't wait 'til everyone starts turning 50.