[Overpaid Slacker]

Mike -- not the name (I have a cousin named Emma, which name I really thought classic when it was given to her 18 years ago) but the group-think that attaches to name-giving and trendynames in general. Certainly no offense to any particular Emma -- you don't get to pick your name.

Nowhere near any sizeable fraction of the girls named Emma in the last 15 years are named after ancestors. They've got the name b/c it was trendy. I'm stuck with a vanilla name whose "popularity" I lament, but it'd suck to get a trendyname... for girls, recently: Britney or Brittany or Bria or Brooke, etc.

I dated an "Abigail" named at birth in 1969 when it wasn't exactly cutting-edge; now it's a trendyname ... and looking at the curve, unless a very few Abigails had literally hundreds of children -each- in the 40's and 50's, there's no way it became the 6th most popular name in 2003 b/c all the girls are so named after gram'ma.

JP