The Name Game

I recently saw a site for the “Top 100 Baby Names” of 2010 and two of my daughters are on the list. I felt a tug of annoyance at this since I have had some misplaced pride over finding unique names for my kids and bucking the trends. But I got over it pretty quickly as my eye was caught by another link: the “Top 100 Pet Names” of 2010. And what I saw surprised me. In the past couple of years a strange phenomenon has been occurring: the baby name list and the pet name list have been growing more comparable until now the top names are just a few places off from list to list. Since people have not become more likely to name their children Fluffy and Spot, that can only mean pet owners are more likely to name their animals people names. It makes sense--people are delaying parenthood more than in the past and the place is now filled with pooches and kitties. And everything that goes with that. There are pet pictures with Santa that then make it to the family Christmas card. People have Facebook pages for their four-legged kids. Many people refer to the pets of their grown children as their “grandpets.” Mother’s Day greetings now include women with “furry children.” And so on. In Judi Barrett’s Animals Should Definitely Not Wear Clothing, there are a lot of ways animals are not like people. But I know a lot of people who disagree.

http://www.amazon.com/Animals-Should-Definitely-Wear-Clothing/dp/0689708076

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judi_Barrett