Article content continuedThe censored data are still useful for tracking the most popular names, but rare names and one-offs like Uren are of interest in themselves (hey, it might catch on), and Alberta’s uncensored data allow for the study of overall trends that might include the lower tail of the frequency distribution. You can show that today’s top names are less commonly used than the most popular ones of the 1980s, but you can also show that singletons in the full dataset, names that have only been assigned once “ever,” are themselves chosen twice as often now as they were in 2002. Alberta's experience suggests that journalists are not going to hunt down the parents who named their newborn boy 'Uren' a few years agoBut this seriousness about open data comes with a cost, because when the dataset is released every year, we all mine it for amusing variants of what are sometimes called “WHL names.” Westerners have what seems to be an enduring propensity for certain classes of personal names, ones that turn up for heckling when the Western Hockey League conducts its annual bantam draft. Endless Tylers and Taylors and Tylors, names ending in “-ayden” that literally span the alphabet, futuristic mishandlings of “Jackson,” names with cowboy auras (Tanner, Scout, Shane), and, as I’ve observed before, a fair number of Coles and Colemans and Codys and Colbys.

Source: National Post June 24, 2020 13:18 UTC