VANITY PLATE CHILDREN! THE AMERICAN PROPENSITY 

TOWARDS NAMING 

MONICA FOOTE 

In American culture, we like namesaking. We like to call our children after 
ourselves, our relatives, or after other people who are important to us. 
Sometimes this practice is taken to extremes. People are familiar with boxer 
George Foreman, his five sons all named George and his daughters Freeda 
George and Georgetta (Foreman 2005). Most families do not go this far, but 
Alice Rossi has found that a high percentage of families include at least 
one child named for someone else. Namesaking does, however, take more 
than this one form and is even more widespread than is readily obvious. 
While very few people actually know a family containing six people named 
George and two with derivatives of that name, most people know at least 
one family that practices namesaking by way of semihomonymous naming, 
in which the children are given names that resemble those of others without 
being identical to them. This frequently, but not always, takes the fonn of 
a recurring initial letter. It is not at all uncommon to come across a family in 
which the parents are named Jack and June and their bright-eyed children 
are John, Julie, Jeff, and Jamie. 

In this paper, the factors that have been found to be most important to 
the naming choices that American parents make will be explored, followed 
by an examination of the studies that suggest that these factors frequently 
lead specifically to children being named after someone else. Both direct 
namesaking and semihomonymous naming will be taken into account and 
answers as to why people would make these kinds of choices will be 
sought in the traditions of the people who tend to do this more frequently 
as well as in the realm of cognitive psychology and the unconscious 
thought processes that inform our preferences. Finally, a look at a certain 
aspect of American world view will enlighten us as to why this practice of 
namesaking has been described as a particularly American phenomenon. 

Americans use a rather small pool of forenames. The Dictionary of 
American Family Names (DAFN), which gives information on the 
provenance and meaning of some 70,000 surnames, and these are only the 
surnames that occur I 00 times or more in the phonebook, states that in 
contrast to this huge pool of surnames, where forenames are concerned, 
95% of the population possesses 1% of the forenames that are currently in 
use. This means that 5% of the population uses very uncommon or entirely 
unique forenames, but the vast majority tends to reuse the same names 
over and over. We shall begin our exploration of why that might be with a 
look at the things that go into a parent's child naming decision-making 
process. 

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