Ordinary Gweilo

As a rule, I try to avoid mentioning so-called news stories that are actually just press releases, but this one struck a bit of a chord with me. I suppose it’s fairly obvious that names go in and out of fashion, but when a friend of mine pointed out several years ago that you could probably guess someone’s age from their name I was quite impressed with this insight. But then, as we know, I am quite a shallow person.

Now it seems that there is company trying to make some money out of this concept. The Guardian and The Scotsman both seem to have had a slow news day and decided that this press release was worth printing. Virtually unaltered, by the look of it, though two journalists have put their names to the stories!!

The Monica system is used to identify consumers. It takes five-year age bands and calculates the chances of the person’s age being in each band. Unless an organisation specifically collects information on customers’ ages, it is very difficult to target people according to age.

Some names have spells of popularity and decline, according to the research. The name Tracey was relatively rare 50 years ago, but it began to appear about 45 years ago and remained popular for 15 years. Similarly, Daren appeared in 1964 and remained popular as Darren for a decade.

Needless to say, these “rules” don’t apply in Hong Kong. In fact, it is quite common to come across people here with first names that it’s hard to believe that anyone under 70 would have in the UK. For example, my grandmother’s first name seems to be very popular here, for some reason, but it certainly doesn’t feature in the top 100 names from the UK (or the top 300, either, I’d bet).

Out of interest, in the UK one hundred years ago, the top 5 names for baby girls were:

Mary
Florence
Doris
Edith
Dorothy

I’d say that Mary is a classic name that doesn’t sound particularly dated, but the other four certainly sound quite old-fashioned. That doesn’t stop them from being adopted by Hong Kong people, but that must be better than the outbreak of Ellies, Chloes, Sophies and Megans that you will currently find in the UK, or the totally eccentric first names (such as “York”, to take a topical example) that some people here choose. There’s nothing wrong with good old-fashioned names.