A Girl Named Madison

This post has nothing to do with Shaw, but I think it’s kind of interesting in a bizarre sort of way.

I happened to be poking around in the Social Security website (in anticipation of impending geezerhood), when I noticed they have a section that lists the most popular names given to babies in the US. I idly clicked on it and was surprised to see that the number 3 name for girls in 2006 was “Madison”.

Well, I have never known a girl child named Madison, and I started wondering how I could have missed such a phenomenon. I sort of knew that girls’ names are much more prone to change with fashion than boys’, which tend to stay pretty much the same (though the recent rise of “Jacob” and “Ethan” are perhaps exceptions). But even though girls’ names come and go in popularity, the rest of the Top 20 are all recognizable as traditional female names.

It turns out that “Madison” peaked in terms of national popularity when it hit #2 on the list in 2001 and 2002, (behind the all-conquering “Emily”). But it is tenaciously holding the #3 spot, and remains the #1 name for girls in every southern state from Louisiana to Delaware (except Florida) and has been for the last several years. (In DC, the top name is “Katherine”, BTW.) In 2002, “Madison” was the #1 girl’s name in 24 states.

But is this just a southern fad? Well, no. Actually, “Madison” didn’t even make the top 1000 list for the US until 1985, when it surfaced at #625. It gradually gained popularity through the nineties and finally cracked the Top 10 in 1997. But it first showed up as a truly popular name in Utah, of all places, when it suddenly appeared as the #2 girls’ name in that state in 1995. By the next year, it was #1 in Utah, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and then spread like wildfire throughout the West and Midwest., but didn’t really catch fire in the South until 2000. Since then, the Madison wave has receded in the square states, but seems to be well-entrenched in Dixie.

So where does the idea of naming a girl “Madison” come from? A bit of googling turned up the theory that it all started with the 1984 movie “Splash”, which featured a mermaid (played by Darryl Hannah, whose last name is also now super-popular among the pink layette set), who picked that name for herself off of a street sign. Well, okay, but then why would take 10 years for it to suddenly emerge in Utah as the new “Jennifer”? Was it a Mormon thing?

Who knows the answers to such mysteries, after all? But it could be worse; at least it wasn’t “Fillmore.”