A friend recently remarked that he hated “trendy” names like “Brody” and “Jayden.” Yahoo answers suggests not only that he has company [1][2][3], but that there are certain patterns common to trendy names that mark them as neo-praenomenisms, like the replacement of “a” with “ay” or “ae” to represent the sound /eI/ (s/Jaden/Jayden), and the replacement of “i” with “y” to represent /I/ (s/Kaitlin/Kaitlyn).

One hypothesis to explain why “trendy” names attract revulsion is that one is likely to have experienced a greater degree of immaturity with younger people, and people with trendy names might be of lower average age than people with more traditional names. That is, trendy names might map more strongly to a younger part of the age spectrum. Wolfram Alpha confirms that people with trendy names are younger, on average:


I wanted to quantify that intuition by generating a set of names that is “trendy” by some statistical measure using the Social Security Administration’s names database, which contains time series of the number of children born in the US with each given name. I picked an arbitrary trendy-sounding name—”Brody”—and identified names with which its time series had the highest correlation. Below are the time series, normalized by max value and smoothed in a three year window, for the 50 names most highly correlated with “Brody”. The darkest line is “Brody,” with lighter lines subsequently less correlated.
What are the least correlated names? Are they Biblical names? Are they names that sound “classical?” Here are their time series, also normalized by max value and smoothed in a three year window:

These names seem to experience a surge of interest in the late 1800s, followed by a dip in the early 20th century; then they peak out around 1920, and wane steadily in popularity to the present day, to the point that they are all quite unpopular. Here are the names themselves:

The names at right aren’t Biblical, but they do sound really old. They’re also all female names, which suggests that a better analysis would consider male and female names separately.

Code is available here.
Data is available here.