That's Lady Grantham to you: the Downton Abbey effect in baby names

 
Today at the ballet I served a customer whose name was Cora. "What's remarkable about that?" you're probably thinking. "Everyone knows that the ballet audience is made up of little old ladies." In fact, my customer (and indeed much of the ballet audience) was not a little old lady but a cute little... 3-year-old girl.

All the same, Cora is a name I would associate with my grandmother's generation, and indeed, in 1900, Cora was the 55th most popular name for female babies in the US. It hit a low of 878th in 1988. Last year Cora had climbed back up to 127th. I guess the Downton Abbey effect is hitting baby names now.

The name seems to have arisen in the late 1700s, possibly as a Latinized form of the Greek Kore (maiden). Oxford's A Dictionary of First Names tells us that "In classical mythology, this was a euphemistic name of the goddess of the underworld, Persephone, and would not have been a well-omened name to take".  

Another name derived from the same source (via French and Latin) is Corinne, a name which hit its peak of popularity in 1926, not long before an aunt of mine called that was born.

The most telling development? The name "Violet". It was one of the first of many flower names to enter the English language in the mid-19th century (note that Downton also houses a Daisy, an Ivy, and a Rose). "Violet" was a very popular name, but it fell out of favour, disappearing from the charts entirely between 1974 and 1998. Then it started a steady comeback, roaring back to 69th place in 2013, a higher ranking even than in the first years of the 20th century. Can this be a coincidence? I think not. This phenomenon also seems to be happening in the UK: http://www.babynames.co.uk/popular-baby-names#name0=Violet .Seriously though, as my mother would say, can you imagine looking at a baby and seeing this:



In contrast, what about poor hapless Edith? Derived from the Anglo-Saxon words ead (wealth) and gyd (strife) -- what an appropriate name for the second Crawley daughter -- it was steadily in the top 50 from 1900-1930, then started what seemed to be an irreversible slide. But even poor Edith must have some fans, because since 2009 the name has struggled up from 845th place to 719th. 

The story for all three names seems to be the same in Ontario:
http://globalnews.ca/news/262867/interactive-popular-baby-names-in-ontario-over-the-past-93-years/

Of course you are all wondering about ...

"Shrimpie". Not likely to stage a comeback, I'd say. More of a "never came".

https://youtu.be/bs5_E1J_9hY?t=16s 


For a discussion of linguistic anachronisms in Downton Abbey, please see this post:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2013/02/linguistic-anachronism-in-downton-abbey.html

Upcoming History of the English Language course (please tell your friends):
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2015/03/rollicking-story-of-english-language.html

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Anthony and... Katherine?

I know it doesn't have the same ring as Cleopatra! In honour of my patron saint, whose feast day it is today, this post is not about ancient lovers, but about an etymological quirk found in my name and also in the name "Anthony". North Americans may notice that many British English speakers pronounce the name "Anthony" as if it were "Antony". And why is one of the short forms of "Katherine" Kate?
Both these names started out in the ancient world without any h's, the former from the ancient Roman family name Antonius and the latter from the Alexandrian saint referred to in Greek as Aikaterine. Here she is with her famous wheel:

But both these names were affected by people's tendency to folk-etymologize. People assumed that the saint's name had to be related to the Greek word for "pure", katharos, so they inserted an h into the spelling. But despite the "improved" spelling,  English speakers in the Middle Ages (like the French from whom they had borrowed the name) did not pronounce "Katherine" with a "th", but still with a "t". This gave rise to the short forms "Kat" and "Kate" (both of which Shakespeare uses punningly in The Taming of the Shrew). The vowel sound in "Kate" shifted from a short a to a long a under the influence of a phenomenon that affected many English vowels between 1400 and 1600 called the Great Vowel Shift.Vowels followed by two or more consonants were unaffected, though, so the vowel remained short in "Katherine" while it was lengthened in "Kate".
One can see why a saint could be associated with purity, but the folk etymology which affected "Antonius" was a bit weirder. For some reason, the English renaissance scholars who just loved lumbering English spelling with silent letters to reflect the words' classical origins were determined that the name "Antony" really had something to do with flowers (anthos in Greek). So they started spelling the name "Anthony". You will notice that the Antoines, Antons, Antonins, Antonios, and so on of the rest of Europe are not similarly afflicted. Unlike the case of Katherine, though, the "th" pronunciation in Anthony did not follow the "th" spelling, at least not in Britain. In North America we have let the (erroneous) spelling influence our pronunciation of this name.

For the etymology of the word "taffy", traditionally eaten by French-Canadians on St. Katherine's day, visit this post.