Today is the third anniversary of my dad's death, and tomorrow would have been (or is, depending on how you think of it) my mom's 90th birthday. So, of course, I was thinking of them.
They were born in the very early 1930s, part of what's called the Silent Generation. They named all four of their daughters with Boomer first names, none with traditional or family names. All of the daughters' names are so common among Boomer women it became an inside joke.
I've known that for a long time, but what I realized today is that the way my parents and many members of their cohort named their kids was an aspect of modernism, rejecting traditional names.
Our names were the Tiffanys and Heathers of our day, the Ashleys and Madisons.
But I also realized that three of us have middle names honoring close relatives in my mom's family. (DN4 has a somewhat traditional middle name, but it's not a relative's name.) So my mom, I guess, was harking back just a bit.
This was a moment of recognizing that Boomers are not modernists: we're the children of modernists. We grew up inside modernism. Suburbia, with its rejection of the city and desire for distance and privacy, was built by and for the Silents to house the Boom.
Many of us thought it was normal and bought into it, while others rejected it. But we did not create it.
Wednesday, February 16, 2022
Boomer Names, Modernism
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4 comments:
May your parents’ memory be for a blessing (which I think is right to say even if I’m a non-believer).
In the mid-aughts I heard William Labov observe how many then-popular girls’ names end in a long e: Ashley, Brittany, and so on. The SSA list of top names for the 2010s shows things moving to the schwa: Emma, Olivia, Sophia, Isabella, Ava, Mia are the top six names. Maybe there'll be a celeb child named Schwa.
DN3's alter ego name as a teen was Schwagirl. Is that ironic? Not sure. Her 1990s birth name ends in a long e.
Schwagirl! A comics character for teaching phonics?
I don't think she ever thought of it as a character (whether for teaching phonics or otherwise). She identified with the idea that it was the most common vowel sound but doesn't actually exist as a character in the alphabet, if I remember correctly.
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