December 25, 2024 • 42 mins
What do you think will be the top baby names of 2025? Will "Mildred" make a comeback? What’s in a name…that makes it popular to one generation, and downright ugly to the next? From "Bertha" and "Layla" to "Reagan" and "Katrina," history shows us that politics, pop songs and news events all play roles in sending baby names skyrocketing or plunging in the rankings. Mo (short for "Maurice"!) returns to his elementary school to speak with his fifth grade teacher about his own name then talks to Columbia University linguist John McWhorter and actor Todd Bridges about other names that have seen better days.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Yes, I would like to ask you a question. Did
you guys like to answer questions for us? A while back,
I visited my alma mater. I'm talking about my first
alma mater, Wood Acres Elementary School in Bethesda, Maryland. Him
mister Raka, I went to this school. When I first
came to wood Acres in the third grade, I wasn't Mo.
(00:23):
I was Maurice Raka. Maurice, a name which felt hopelessly
out of style. I was the only Maurice in the
whole school. But maybe the name has a better rep Now, Okay,
I'm gonna ask each of you question, and that's what
I've come back to find out. I started off slowly, though,
asking about other names which peaked long ago.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
When I say the name Mildred, what do you think of.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
London?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
I think of an old British person.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
All yeah, yeah, I agreed, me too. Okay, what about
what about the name Tha?
Speaker 1 (01:01):
An old lady?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
That's fat?
Speaker 4 (01:05):
I agree?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I agree, I agree.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
It is unmity here.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I must confess. I get what they're saying. In the
twenty first century, names like Mildred and Bertha conjure certain images.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Is it the er? Is it the thaw.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
I think that, yeah, all of it just all together.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, what about the name.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Todd A tall person that plays golf kind of I'm
like middle aged, like in his forties, tall brown hair.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
I think they're kind of weird.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
Yeah, that's a tar that's a tall.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
That's finally I mustered the courage to ask them about
my name.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
What do you think of the name Maurice?
Speaker 3 (01:53):
I think of like an old French dude, like a
young person who travels a lot, maybe doesn't.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Have a home, see on the run from the law.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Why is he Maybe he just kind of like stays
in hotels and just goes everywhere.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Like some like singer.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
Maybe that's like they're not really known.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Yeah, they're like a local kind of person, but they
still chase, they move a lot.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Not really known, a local kind of person out But
it turns out there is a traveling singer named Maurice
van Hokee travel and Maurice is also a portly frenchman
in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Help don't help me
for Ree's wait, I need to help. But the name
(02:41):
Maurice maybe permanently on the way out. We Maurice's reached
the height of our popularity in the nineteen twenties, when
there were an average of about sixteen hundred born annually.
Now just a few hundred come into the world each year.
What makes a name rise and fall in the ranks?
But makes a name pretty and popular to one generation
(03:03):
and unique or downright ugly to the next. From CBS
Sunday Morning and iHeart I'm Maurice Raka and this is mobituaries.
This moment the death of a name. I knew a
(03:30):
kid in elementary school named Jeff Heebner. He was friendly,
he was good at soccer, he was cool. He could
introduce himself with confidence. Because he was a Jeff. He
perfectly embodied his own name. I, on the other hand,
always felt awkward telling people my name. Maybe it was
because growing up I knew of only three other Maurice's.
(03:53):
There was children's book author Maurice Sendak, who wrote the
classic Where the Wild Things Are. Was the Maurice from
that Steve Miller band song The Joker.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Becoming Maice I speak of.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
That was kind of cool, but that was canceled out
by French entertainer Maurice Chevalier. I m I see a
little girl of five or six or seven.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
I can't resist the joy or.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Spell that song he sang in Gigi Thick Kevin fall
a little girl. I can't believe he hasn't been canceled
for that, But that was pretty much it. I was
born Maurice Albert Raca. My mother tells me my father
was the one who really wanted to name me Maurice.
She would have preferred Gabriel. My father is no longer living,
(04:47):
so I can't know for sure, but I think he
wanted something on the gentler side, since Raca can sound brusque.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
But I didn't like it.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
At one point I thought maybe I should go by
al I mean, which had been crazy. I mean, like,
when I think about it, I'm not crazy. It just
would have sounded odd al Raca. I talked to one
of my former teachers about it. That day I visited
wood Acres. Her name is Miss Venisi, and she was
one of my all time favorites. She was patient, kind,
(05:20):
and impossibly glamorous. More about that in a bit. Turns
out she could have made a pretty decent therapist too.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Now you said you didn't like your name, so were
you teased in school?
Speaker 6 (05:33):
You know.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I don't know that I was ever teased for my name.
It just felt so different, it felt foreign. Everything changed
when I graduated from Wood Acres to Pile Middle School,
and oddly enough, it was thanks to the aptly named
Jeff Heebner.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
I know him, I mean, I remember him. He was
very blonde, very blonde.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
And when I went to Pile, it's kind of scary
all the elementary schools feeding into the big junior high
and the fizz ed teacher there of the first days
did roll call and said, you know, when I get
to your name, if you have a name you prefer
you as, I'll write it in the in the book.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
And then she said Maurice Rock.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
I said here, and then Jeff Heapner said, he's not Maurice,
He's Mo. And that's kind of how I got my.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
I was going to ask you, so Jeff just came
out with it and you preferred it obviously.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, kind of I liked that.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
It was easy, yeah, and it kind of popped. But
now I love when people call me Maurice. So you
have to call me for this episode.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
I'm Maurice.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
I wasn't sure and what to call you, whether I
should call you, Maurice Amo.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
And if there's anyone who would understand this kind of
confusion over one's own name, it's Miss Vanisi, Mildred Vanisi.
Despite what those kids said earlier, Mildred Venisi is not British,
but the granddaughter of Italian immigrants.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
And there was a custom I doubt if it's still
in existence, that the firstborn I was the firstborn is
named either for the father's mother or the father's father,
of course, dependent upon the sex. My grandmother's name was Camella,
and I'm sure that my parents, being first generation, wanted
(07:12):
an anglicized name. Kamella's were called Milly. Millie is Mildred.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Growing up, Miss Venisi didn't know any other Mildred's and
she didn't really like her name. Lucky for her, she
too got a nickname that eventually stuck.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Somewhere along the line. I started being called Milly. Not
by family, my mother and father. I was still Mildred,
but my generation, my friends started calling me that. My
sisters call me Milly, and so now I introduced myself
that way. It just happened, just happened. I think the
name Millie flows better. It's a little more musical than Mildred.
(07:54):
I just think Mildred is harsh.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
She's not thoroughly modern Mildred.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
No, right, that wouldn't sound good. That just would not
sound good.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
I also never thought Mildred was an appropriate moniker for
Miss Venisi, with her luxuriant mane of dark curly hair,
her Jackie O sunglasses, her Jordash jeans or were they
Gloria Vanderbilt?
Speaker 6 (08:22):
Look?
Speaker 1 (08:22):
All I know is that no other teacher looked like
she just walked off the setup and Aaron spelling nighttime soap. Honestly,
Miss VANSI was so fabulous I could barely contain myself.
I don't know if you'll remember, so if you don't,
it's kind of like a confession.
Speaker 5 (08:37):
I guess.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
But I remember in fifth grade waiting outside the all
Purpose room for lunch. But when you walked by, I said, Hey,
what's shake and Millie? He wheeled around. Yeah, and I
think you said something like, did you ever call me
that again? I, Miss Venisi, I probably did.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Teach.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
The name Mildred reached its peak in nineteen twenty, when
more than eighteen thousand babies were named Mildred. It was
the sixth most popular girls name that year popular enough
that there are a number of notable Mildreds throughout history.
Mildred J. Hill was the composer of Good Morning to All,
(09:23):
the melody of which became the Happy Birthday Song.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
And then that movie Mildred Piers with Germany Crawft that
must have been in the forties.
Speaker 6 (09:31):
Now I'm sure of one thing, at least, I want
my daughter back.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Mildred Gillers an American who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany
during World War Two, also known as Axis Sally. She
was indicted after the war in charge with trees and Okay,
so that's not a good Mildred.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
That's not a good Mildred. But I think I've heard
of Axis Sally.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
But after hitting its popularity peak in the early twentieth century,
Mildred slowly slid down the list of the thousand most
popular names. In twenty seventeen, only eighty three newborn girls
were named Mildred in the US. Recent users on one
baby naming website dismissed the name as sounding too much
(10:13):
like Mildew wrote another makes me think of dreading something.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
I was the only Mildred in all my years at
school there was a period of time when a lot
of girls are named Karen, and there was another period
of time where a lot of girls name Janet. I
don't know, but I just think that names have cycles,
and maybe something triggers.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
It, as she so often was when I was growing up.
Mildred Venisi is right.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Coming up.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
I'm going to talk with linguist John mcwardo about what
makes names pretty, prickly or popular. But first in in
memoriam for another name that left us, Hortense. We hardly
knew you. Despite your French origins. Your name lacked the crisp,
bright bubbliness of champagne and the addictive qualities of your
(11:12):
country's cheeses. Disney must have had a thing for you,
because Hortense McDuck is Donald Duck's mother. Donald gets an
ostrich named Hortense, and his uncle Scrooge McDuck named his
horse Hortense Alas Disney was never going to create a
princess Hortense as a name, You're just not pretty. You
(11:33):
barely cracked the top four hundred names in the US
around the turn of the twentieth century, and you slid
off the top one thousand after nineteen forty one. Now,
ordensia does have a nice frame to it. It's the
Spanish version of hortense or densia also means hydrangia. To
be clear, I'm not suggesting anyone named their daughter hydrangea hortense.
(11:56):
You are strictly past tense, gone, and yes forgotten. To
understand better why names come and go, I talked with
an expert, Columbia University Associates Professor of Comparative literature and
(12:17):
linguist John mcward. How did you become a John?
Speaker 5 (12:21):
I'm John Hamilton mcwarter the fifth, and John Hamilton mccuorter
the first was a slave, So I was named because
of that relentless succession and the idea that you don't
break it. And as a matter of fact, I know
if my father hadn't been John Hamilton mcquarter the fourth,
I would be named Bruce. That's what my mother would
have chosen. And I would have named my son John,
(12:42):
except he's a girl, and so the name had to
stop with my two girls. So she has my middle.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Name, Johanna. In Italian, you'd have Johnny and Johanna in
English Johnette, none of them. That just sounds like a
tiny little bathroom. We live in an efficiency. We only
have room for a John after John mcwarter was born
in nineteen sixty five, when John was the second most
(13:08):
popular name in the country, and the name John isn't
going away. It's still in the top thirty names for
boys in the US. But if you go back in
time to the early twentieth century, John was far and
away the number one boy's name. America was producing John's
in mass quantities. It was like the model t of names.
(13:29):
In fact, if you were born in that era, it
was really common for you to have a name that
was in the top ten. People just seemed to want
to fit in.
Speaker 5 (13:39):
You go back to that time and there is a
sense of what a normal American person is that would
strike us today as almost bizarrely homogenous. And that's not
to say that there weren't some ripples going on around
the edges, but there was a certain sense that America was,
you know, turkey and apple pie, and that's what one was.
(13:59):
One was very, very very white.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Well that's so interesting because aren't there those are competing impulses, right.
I want my child to have a name that makes
him or her special. I also want my child to
have a name that makes him or her fit in.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
And that right.
Speaker 5 (14:16):
So and back then, no special. I mean, if you
think of somebody naming their child in eighteen sixty five,
most people did not want something that would make the
child feel special, or it would be something going on
with the middle name, something that was less known. You
might play with it.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Even when I was in school in the seventies and eighties,
I remember the popular names were really popular. Oh yeah,
I mean in junior high I was drowning in Jennifer's.
Speaker 5 (14:42):
Oh, they were everywhere. That's right.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
What was going on?
Speaker 5 (14:44):
Jennifers and Jenny's.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
That's right, there's so many Jennifers. Oh, it was a
tsunami of them in school.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Seven Jennifers.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
But the days of a few names dominating are over.
At its peak, a full five percent of all newborn
male babies were named John one in twenty Fast forward
to twenty twenty one, and the top names for females
and males, Olivia and Liam, made up only around one
percent of babies born that year. In other words, the
(15:19):
most popular names are less popular. Parents today shoot for originality.
Speaker 5 (15:26):
There's a sense that if you're going to name a child.
You spontaneously reach out and you think, how can we
have a little bit of fun with this, so you
don't want to torture your child. I once knew this
poor little boy. His parents had named him Rotunda Thanksgiving Jones. Oh,
and it was because he was born when John F.
Kennedy was laid out in the rotunda, and they named
(15:48):
him Thanksgiving just because, and of course he was made
fun of.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
It sounds like a song, and have forgotten Gershwin musical.
Speaker 5 (15:55):
That's because there were songs like that Rotunda Thanksgiving. Gents,
you can and this guy really had that name. It's
a tragic thing, but you want your child to be
somewhat different, probably not too different, but I think most
people think not the average thing, unless it's named after
a grandparent or a father or something like that.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
John mcwarter says that trend towards uniqueness and away from
uniformity tracks with broader changes in American society.
Speaker 5 (16:25):
I think it's very much a spirit of individuality, and
of course many people would say that the spirit of
individuality is part of what being an American is. But
there's an extreme that happens, and I think it happens
after the nineteen sixties, with the sense of what was
called the Me generation in the seventies, and then the
greater respect for and awareness of the diversity of americannesses
(16:47):
that you get that really becomes default starting in the eighties.
That's when a certain browning of the culture happens. Think
about nineteen eighty four is when The Cosby Show becomes
a big hit. Vanessa Williams becomes the first black Miss
America and I new Miss America.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
There's Mavnasillams.
Speaker 5 (17:08):
Beverly Hills. Cop is almost the biggest selling movie in
the country. You know, this is the cleanest and nicest
police card ever been.
Speaker 4 (17:17):
In in my life.
Speaker 5 (17:17):
That's only eighty four and that's just black diversity. I
think we've become much more comfortable with America not just
being my three sons starting in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
As a part of that change, there's a shift in
naming traditions, especially among Black Americans. Nineteen eighty is a
particularly interesting year for naming kids. That year, sixty percent
of black girls are given a unique name, one that
no one else has. Mcwarterur points out that after the
civil rights movement of the nineteen sixties, afrocentrism gained traction
(17:51):
in the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 5 (17:53):
So once you get past integration as the watch cry,
and there's a certain kind of in some ways healthy
separatism that's afoot, then it becomes natural to be comfortable
making up a name. And so what happens, frankly is
I've often thought that black girls in particular tend to
have more interesting names because it's considered okay to just
(18:14):
make it up. And what you get are all of
these beautiful African style names for people born in the
United States. And it's all rather pretty, but it really explodes,
especially with the sense of Africa and the African heritage
rising in the nineteen seventies. That's when you get little
girls named Mikiba.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Well, I'm going to impress you right now and tell you,
and I'm sorry if it sounds boastful. In college, I
was in a production of Little Shop of Horrors with
Katanji Brown now Katanji Brown Jackson. I was Seymour, thank
you very much. She was run at and she was fantastic.
She was fantastically you notice, yeah, and she yeah, she
(18:55):
was not Crystal. I'm suddenly forging thelast one's name. But anyways,
did improv comedy together? But her name, I know you've
written about her name improv. H Wow, she thinks really funny?
Speaker 5 (19:07):
Is she funny? She is?
Speaker 2 (19:08):
I'm telling you.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
We will because we are going to make sure that
hearings are now you know, the simulcast on Comedy Central.
I because she's that funny.
Speaker 5 (19:19):
I want to know that about her. Yeah, that's a
perfect example that her name is Katanji. If she were
a generation older, her name would probably be Carolyn. But
now it is Katanji Brown Jackson. And that's ordinary starting
especially with women of her generation. It's nice to see.
I mean, Katanji is a much more interesting name than Carolyn.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
But one group of people, we expect original names from celebrities.
It's practically a rite of passage. The first time I
can remember this happening is in two thousand and four
when Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin named their daughter Apple.
At the time it was weird. Now totally normal. Kylie
Jenner has a daughter named Stormy, and it's not with
(20:00):
a y, it's with an eye at the end. Yeah,
And Elon Musk has won that somebody can pronounce it's
a bunch of symbols. I think by the way I
looked it up, it's pronounced x ash a twelve.
Speaker 5 (20:11):
All of that is because they are public figures, and
so for them, naming is a public act. And if
it's going to be a public act, then you want
to do something that's going to stand out rather than
something that's going to bore people. If somebody like Gwyneth
Paltrow sets off a tradition, next thing, you know, everybody's
doing it.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
So it's sort of a celebrity contagion in a way.
Speaker 5 (20:29):
I think I would put it just that way. What
Jay Z and Beyonce Blue Ivy. That's really beautiful, but
it's not African. It's not the usual tradition. That's something
they came up with all by themselves, as people who
knew that everybody was watching them having that child. So
that's where you get that tradition. And that seems to
actually cut across races with celebrities too. Yeah, it's it's
(20:52):
a show. It's a it's a kind of display, And
I don't mean that in a bad way.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Most parents aren't going to resort to their kids after
a combination of math aircraft and Elvin symbols representing artificial intelligence,
which is what Musk's baby's name represents. But throughout history,
parents have often taken naming cues from pop culture. Well,
I'm going to quiz you on it right now. Actually
it's really fun, so I'll start off really easy. Shirley
(21:21):
saw a dramatic spike between nineteen thirty two and nineteen
thirty five because of I wish mother.
Speaker 5 (21:26):
Hair of Little Shirley Temple. And if you think about it,
nobody is named Shirley before then, and then all of
a sudden, everybody's grandmother is named Shirley by the late
twentieth century, and now the name is impossible. Meet little Shirley.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Never Michelle entered the top twenty in nineteen sixty five
because that was the same year.
Speaker 5 (21:47):
It has to be because of that song.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
My Bell.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Yeah, the Beatles song.
Speaker 5 (21:56):
Nobody is named Michelle. Maybe in France ants you're just
kind of guessing, but not here, I mean you Michelle's.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Yeah, we've got a lot of Michelle's running around, women
named Michelle.
Speaker 5 (22:07):
Women, but not here, not before then.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Oh, I see what you're saying, Like, there's.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
No first lady named Michelle. Right, and if you think
about it, Michelle there was no first lady name Michelle
good point right, only only after and she's named around that.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Time Michelle Polk.
Speaker 5 (22:24):
No Michelle Quincatams, Michelle quin No suffragette named Michelle, you
know that's that's right, it's Michelle Katie's.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
The name Layelah first appeared in the top one thousand
in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 5 (22:42):
No, why then.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Eric Clapton song Whoops, Yeah, I'm.
Speaker 5 (22:50):
Not as good at modern pop.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Now, that's fine.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
I love that you and I have the same definition
of modern pop. Nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 5 (22:57):
Everything ends.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
So this is a trick question. Rosanna shot up in
nineteen eighty two because of that Toto song, Right, yes,
I interviewed Patricia Arquette. That song was named after her sister,
also an actress, But Patricia pointed out to me that
her sister's name is really pronounced Rosanna.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
I'm Rosanna Arquette, and.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
I'm so they got the pronunciation of her name wrong.
Speaker 6 (23:28):
Hi, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear, Hi, Ronald Reagan, do
solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of
President of the United States at Iowa Faith.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
After Reagan became president in the eighties, the name Reagan,
not Ronald as much, but the name Reagan surged in popularity,
landing in the top one hundred by twenty twelve. Now
here's what I think is fascinating is that Republican parents
were more likely to pick the name Reagan for their
kid if they lived in a district that was purple,
(24:00):
that was sort of evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.
Then you make a statement exactly, then if they weren't
a deep red Republican enclave.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
Right, then they don't need to stand out, They don't
need to stake their individuality exactly. And of course they
weren't thinking of this consciously. So much goes on subconsciously.
I doubt any of those families said, so many people
around here vote Democratic, that let's name her Reagan. It
was just part of the warp and wolf of their
psychology because of sensing themselves as a minority or as
(24:28):
not more than half of their district. Well, that's fascinating. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
And if you're in a purple district and you name
your kid Reagan, do you plant the kid on the
front lawn during election time.
Speaker 5 (24:41):
That's right, mommy, how long do I have to stand here?
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Spend some time with the Social Security Administration's baby named database,
and you'll see a sort of pendulum swing over the
last century, especially among girls. Half of the most popular girls'
names started with vowels in the eighteen eighties. Then we're
all consonants. By nineteen fifty, Anna and Emma became Patricia
(25:09):
and Deborah. Now vowels are back in a big way.
It makes you wonder why.
Speaker 5 (25:16):
Certainly in terms of how we perceive beauty, at least
in English and in related languages, vowels are beautiful because
they involve no obstruction of the airflow. Stop sounds such
as those are the ugliest sounds because you have to stop.
Those are the ones that you're calling the jabbing sounds.
Then there's everything in between, so you get a buzz
(25:40):
at least you get a hiss, and then with yeah,
whoa those might as well be vowels. So having more
vowels now could have something to do with people looking
for a certain mollifluousness in names. Now why people would
have valued it more during the McKinley administration than during
the Coolidge administers. I have no idea. I get the
(26:02):
feeling that is random.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Statistical flutter mc water says that over time, fashions change gradually,
and something you once found repellent you now find irresistible.
Speaker 5 (26:15):
You know how, today, if you have a dinner party,
every second time you have brussel sprouts, probably with bacon
or something like that, imagine how unthinkable that was. Say,
even as recently as twenty five years ago, you didn't
give people you liked brussel sprouts.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
You did not russels sprouts or were synonymous with something
that was visible torture.
Speaker 5 (26:34):
Torture, Yeah, I mean little cabbages. They sucked, and so
you wouldn't give them to anybody. And you don't even
have to dress them up that much now we're used
to them. That's partly fashion. I don't think that the
Brussels sprout's lobby created this. Sometime early in the George W.
Bush administration.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
One recent trend boys' names ending in a certain consonant.
What is this with all these boys today? Baby boys
having an N at the end of their We've got
all these logans, Masons, Ethan's, Jackson's.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
We subconsciously associate that un with a kind of a
gracious masculinity. It's what you want to name your little boy.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
As opposed to Jack, which is always too severe.
Speaker 5 (27:15):
Jack might be a bully. Yeah, not only old fashioned,
but Jack Jack's people up. You know, Ethan has conversations.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
You imagine Ethan is open to change, like he's right, right.
Speaker 5 (27:28):
He reasons right. Ethan reasons as opposed to Jack, who
just sits yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
But even names that hit that right mix of vowels
and and just right, ones that are pined after in
song or become famous in the names of movie characters
or the actors who play them. Well, just like we
as a society can birth the name, we can also
let it die. But first another in memoriam for sid
(27:59):
stan irv Cy, Shelley, and Morty. No, they weren't the
original white staff at the Carnegie Deli. In the late
eighteen hundreds, Sidney, Stanley, Irving, Seymour, Sheldon, and Morton were
all popular baby boy names with WASP that is, White
Anglo Saxon Protestant parents. Then in the late nineteen twenties,
(28:21):
many American Jewish parents began choosing these names for their
baby boys to help them fit in. But America's wasps
apparently felt stung and took flight from these names. Soon enough, Sidney, Stanley, Irving, Seymour, Sheldon,
and Morton were seen as stereotypically Jewish, and their assimilation
(28:42):
value greatly diminished. As documented by sociologist Stanley Lieberson, American
Jews eventually abandoned the names as well. Incidentally, another name
in that category was Morris, a sort of cousin to Maurice,
but at least Morris was the name of a terrifically
droll tabby who used to sell cat food on TV commercials.
Speaker 6 (29:05):
Nine Live Seafood Pladder anchors away.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Pop culture and big news events can correlate with names surging,
even when those events are disasters. After Hurricane Katrina, names
that began with the letter K actually jumped by nine percent,
according to an analysis by professors at Wharton Business School.
The sheer repetition of the name Katrina, it seems, had
(29:37):
a subliminal effect that K sound got stuck in people's heads.
But the name Katrina itself, well, Katrina had been a
pretty popular name and even broke the top one hundred
for a while in the late seventies and eighties. After
the storm, though the name quickly fell out of fashion
and in twenty thirteen dropped out of the top one
(29:58):
thousand entirely. Indeed, history can be a name killer as well.
The name Isis saw a burst of popularity in the
early nineteen seventies thanks to a Saturday Morning superhero of
the same name, and.
Speaker 6 (30:13):
Found she was heir to the sacrets of Isis.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
And so it has since fallen out of favor with
the rise of the Islamic State, which I find reassuring.
But Bertha toppled from a much greater height. In nineteen eighteen,
mothers birthed more than five thousand Berthas. Try saying that
five times fast. So what happened to Bertha? Well, Bertha
(30:41):
was the name of a German heiress to krupp Ag,
a German weapons manufacturer, and during World War One the
company began making heavy guns. Those guns were dubbed big
Berthas by the Germans. The Allies then this nickname that
was being called the Big Bertha, and they began using
(31:03):
it for all heavy artillery, so it suddenly became synonymous
with big heavy portly right.
Speaker 5 (31:09):
Right, yeah, So the next thing you know, Bertha is overweight.
Is it's associated with being large?
Speaker 1 (31:15):
That's linguished John mcwater again. But is there also something
about just the sound of it birth thought? I mean it,
I'm thinking of girth birth.
Speaker 5 (31:26):
The error is not pretty because it's not as open
as other vowel sounds. The thuh is a little unpleasant,
and it begins with a stop consonant. But er, I
mean it's it's nasty in that way. But then, especially
just because it was associated with something that was portly.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
I work with a woman who was telling me about
a person in her neighborhood that she doesn't like, and
she said, oh, I cut her a wide berth.
Speaker 5 (31:51):
And it's a wide berth. Right. I never thought about that, right, Yeah.
And you wonder why that expression catches on? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Boy, I wonder what it would take for Bertha to
come back, Hi, Bertha, I don't see it. After World
War One, Bertha faded into obscurity and was off the
top one thousand list by the mid nineteen eighties. But
a name doesn't have to become synonymous with military weaponry
(32:20):
or get added to a terrorist watch list to fade.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
Sometimes names just wear out. They fall out of the
rotation in the same way you'll find a shirt that
you really like and it still fits, and it's in
your closet and you haven't worn it for five years
for no real reason. A name with ugly sounds can
last almost a counterintuitively long time. For example, Richard, what
an ugly name that is? And think about how much
(32:44):
uglier the nickname is, and how there were, until about
ten minutes ago, normal male people running around in Anglophone
America named Dick and nobody bad at a nine. It
wasn't only Dick sargent at dick yorke. I knew a
Dick back in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Has anything to do with the wedshed.
Speaker 5 (33:04):
Dick Lincoln, and he was taken seriously as an executive.
Only with the past generation or two has that stop.
And not only is dick ridiculous and dick was used
to mean what it meant long before it went out,
but dick is an ugly word by these standards.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
Composer Cole Porter would beg to differ many time.
Speaker 6 (33:26):
Time.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
One of the other names I've been pondering is Todd.
Todd showed up in the thirties and just grew and grew.
We hit peak Todd in nineteen sixty four. More than
fifteen thousand were born that year. I used to know
tons of Todd's, but now I haven't met a baby
Todd in decades. What do you think the appeal was
(33:55):
in the first place.
Speaker 5 (33:56):
I think it's partly because ah is the most basic
sound and humanity. It's the first sound that babies make.
And then with Todd, what you have is a kind
of a nice assonance, as it were, because tou and
duh are the same sound but different. Duah is too,
with a little bit of belly in it, so you
don't have to make a change. There was something pleasant
(34:18):
about Todd. Todd was like a little white potato that's
one of those little balls and it's boiled just right.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
That's like Todd, like a tater Todd. Yes, I guess
he would have to be deep fried as well as
Todd off and a lovely woman named Millie with a
hairnet giving it to you. Personally. I like Todd, and
I brought in one of my favorite Todds to defend
(34:49):
his name, Todd Bridges. Todd Bridges was born in nineteen
sixty five, just one year after peak Todd, and when
he was a teenager, he got a starring role in
the hit TV show Different Strokes as Willis Jackson, opposite
Gary Coleman as Arnold.
Speaker 4 (35:07):
Yeah, Phyllis is in.
Speaker 5 (35:08):
Man, Why don't you ask her? How Arnold?
Speaker 4 (35:09):
Are you kidding? So starter?
Speaker 1 (35:11):
She doesn't even known me.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
My mom said that she dreamed my name because there's
not very many black Todd's. I don't know if you
know that or not, but there isn't. I think I
know Todd Gurley, the football player, and that's about it.
I don't think I know anybody else named Todd.
Speaker 5 (35:27):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Even though Todd was near its peak when Bridges was born,
it was indeed as white as those potatoes.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
And I'll tell you what happened, which is really funny.
One time I got a check somewhere that I was
living at and it said Todd Bridges and I'm looking,
I don't know of his company, and it's for a
couple thousand dollars. I'm like, I know, I say, this
is not me. So what happened was the postman thought
it was me, and it was an address down the street,
and I went down the street and bringing the bell
and I go, hey, man, is there a Todd Bridges.
(35:55):
He goes, yeah, it's me, and he goes, oh, hey Todd.
I go, hey Todd, and I gave him it was his.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
There's another Todd Bridges right down the street.
Speaker 4 (36:03):
It was right down the street fromhere I used to
live at. Yeah, another guy was a white guy.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
That's kind of crazy. People get their names made fun
of for all sorts of reasons. Is there anything you
can do with Todd? Were you ever teased?
Speaker 4 (36:14):
Well, a lot of people thought that Todd was short
for Theodore, but I'm like, no, that's Ted.
Speaker 5 (36:20):
That show for Theodore.
Speaker 4 (36:21):
Todd is just Todd.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Then in the nineteen seventies, Todd fell off the baby naming.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
Cliff oh Man. Todd fell off the Matt dang.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
In twenty fifteen, there were only two hundred and twelve
baby boys named Todd. And did you ever consider naming
any of your children Todd?
Speaker 4 (36:41):
No? No. I named my son Spencer, but I spelled
it differently, Okay, I mean we spelled his SPN C
I R. And it's been serious.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Now, why did you do that?
Speaker 4 (36:57):
We just thought it'd make it just original because Spencer
is out there and it's you know, SBN cer. We
just wanted to make it original, and it's original.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Spencer, it totally is. George Carlin had a whole bit
a routine in two thousand and one where he actually
made fun of the name Todd.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
He made fun of a number of he really did.
Speaker 4 (37:14):
I didn't see that.
Speaker 5 (37:14):
What did he say?
Speaker 4 (37:16):
And I'm getting.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Really sick a guy's name Todd?
Speaker 4 (37:20):
You know, Yeah, it's just a goofy.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
It's a goofy fucking name.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
Okay, Hi, what's your name? Todd? Is he still around?
Speaker 1 (37:28):
He is not still around, but great stand.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
He is lucky because I'd have to go choke him
out messing with my name. It's not a goofy name.
It's a cool name. It's Todd.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
We end this episode with a nod to Western civilization's
earliest baby naming book, the Bible. From Adam and Eve
to Ahab and Jezebel, there are well over a thousand
different names mentioned between the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament.
People have been blessing and sometimes saddling their kids with
(38:13):
the names of patriarchs and prophets patriarchs in magi for
over one thousand years. The most recently popular baby names
in the us have included Jonah, Elijah, Naomi, and Noah.
I was surprised to see that even the name Lazarus
has risen from the dead. Of course, not every biblical
name is heaven sent. Judas, if we ignore your history
(38:37):
for a second, you're not terrible. Your spelling makes sense,
and you have no off putting hard consonants. Then again,
your behavior toward Jesus was more.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Than off putting.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Your name has been permanently shunned. Earlier biblical outcasts haven't
fared much better. Sure, there were three hundred Canes born
in twenty fifteen, but nearly ten ten times as many
Abeles were born that year. It doesn't pay to kill
your brother. Jesus, of course, is a popular name, especially
as Heesus. But Judas, I don't see you ever cracking
(39:11):
the top one thousand.
Speaker 5 (39:13):
Come here, little Judas, Yeah, there are more than time
for your dip.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
They're not.
Speaker 5 (39:23):
Friendless, dateless little boy.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Esther and Ruth your solid names, if not always easy
to say. Hey, Esther, meet me at Ruth's Christ's Steakhouse.
You're the only two women with books of the Bible
named after you. But after the nineteen thirties, your name's
made a quick exodus, Yet history shows us that most
names are cyclical. What's old, sometimes very old is new again. Indeed, Genesis,
(39:52):
the very first book of the Bible, has seen a
surge in popularity as a first name since the nineteen nineties. PS.
If you ever see me out on the street, feel
free to call me Maurice. I kind of miss it.
(40:12):
I certainly hope you enjoyed this Mobituary. May I ask
you to please rate and review our podcast. You can
also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can
follow me on Twitter at Morocca. Hear all new episodes
of Mobituaries every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts, and
check out Mobituaries. Great Lives Worth Reliving, the New York
(40:36):
Times best selling book, now available in paperback and audiobook.
It includes plenty of stories not in the podcast. This
episode of Mobituaries was produced by Jake Harper and Aaron Schrank.
Our team of producers also includes Wilcoe Martinez Caccero, and
me Mo Roca. It was edited by Mara Walls and
(40:57):
engineered by Sam Bear, with fact checking by Naomi Barr.
Our production company is Neon Humm Media. Our archival producer
is Jamie Benson. Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart.
Indispensable support from Craig Schwegler, Dustin Gervais, Alan Pang, Reggie
(41:18):
Bazil and everyone at CBS News Radio. Special thanks to
Megan Marcus, Alberto Robina and the staff of wood Acres Elementary.
The inimitable Aaron Schrank is our senior producer. Executive producers
for Mobituaries include Steve Razis and Morocca. The series is
(41:40):
created by Yours truly and as always undying gratitude to
Rand Morrison and John Carp for helping breathe life into
Mobituaries
Yes, I would like to ask you a question. Did
you guys like to answer questions for us? A while back,
I visited my alma mater. I'm talking about my first
alma mater, Wood Acres Elementary School in Bethesda, Maryland. Him
mister Raka, I went to this school. When I first
came to wood Acres in the third grade, I wasn't Mo.
(00:23):
I was Maurice Raka. Maurice, a name which felt hopelessly
out of style. I was the only Maurice in the
whole school. But maybe the name has a better rep Now, Okay,
I'm gonna ask each of you question, and that's what
I've come back to find out. I started off slowly, though,
asking about other names which peaked long ago.
Speaker 2 (00:45):
When I say the name Mildred, what do you think of.
Speaker 3 (00:51):
London?
Speaker 1 (00:52):
I think of an old British person.
Speaker 2 (00:54):
All yeah, yeah, I agreed, me too. Okay, what about
what about the name Tha?
Speaker 1 (01:01):
An old lady?
Speaker 2 (01:02):
That's fat?
Speaker 4 (01:05):
I agree?
Speaker 3 (01:06):
I agree, I agree.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
It is unmity here.
Speaker 1 (01:09):
I must confess. I get what they're saying. In the
twenty first century, names like Mildred and Bertha conjure certain images.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Is it the er? Is it the thaw.
Speaker 1 (01:21):
I think that, yeah, all of it just all together.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah, what about the name.
Speaker 3 (01:31):
Todd A tall person that plays golf kind of I'm
like middle aged, like in his forties, tall brown hair.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
I think they're kind of weird.
Speaker 4 (01:41):
Yeah, that's a tar that's a tall.
Speaker 1 (01:42):
That's finally I mustered the courage to ask them about
my name.
Speaker 2 (01:50):
What do you think of the name Maurice?
Speaker 3 (01:53):
I think of like an old French dude, like a
young person who travels a lot, maybe doesn't.
Speaker 2 (01:58):
Have a home, see on the run from the law.
Speaker 3 (02:01):
Why is he Maybe he just kind of like stays
in hotels and just goes everywhere.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
Like some like singer.
Speaker 5 (02:07):
Maybe that's like they're not really known.
Speaker 3 (02:10):
Yeah, they're like a local kind of person, but they
still chase, they move a lot.
Speaker 1 (02:15):
Not really known, a local kind of person out But
it turns out there is a traveling singer named Maurice
van Hokee travel and Maurice is also a portly frenchman
in Disney's Beauty and the Beast. Help don't help me
for Ree's wait, I need to help. But the name
(02:41):
Maurice maybe permanently on the way out. We Maurice's reached
the height of our popularity in the nineteen twenties, when
there were an average of about sixteen hundred born annually.
Now just a few hundred come into the world each year.
What makes a name rise and fall in the ranks?
But makes a name pretty and popular to one generation
(03:03):
and unique or downright ugly to the next. From CBS
Sunday Morning and iHeart I'm Maurice Raka and this is mobituaries.
This moment the death of a name. I knew a
(03:30):
kid in elementary school named Jeff Heebner. He was friendly,
he was good at soccer, he was cool. He could
introduce himself with confidence. Because he was a Jeff. He
perfectly embodied his own name. I, on the other hand,
always felt awkward telling people my name. Maybe it was
because growing up I knew of only three other Maurice's.
(03:53):
There was children's book author Maurice Sendak, who wrote the
classic Where the Wild Things Are. Was the Maurice from
that Steve Miller band song The Joker.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
Becoming Maice I speak of.
Speaker 1 (04:12):
That was kind of cool, but that was canceled out
by French entertainer Maurice Chevalier. I m I see a
little girl of five or six or seven.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
I can't resist the joy or.
Speaker 1 (04:24):
Spell that song he sang in Gigi Thick Kevin fall
a little girl. I can't believe he hasn't been canceled
for that, But that was pretty much it. I was
born Maurice Albert Raca. My mother tells me my father
was the one who really wanted to name me Maurice.
She would have preferred Gabriel. My father is no longer living,
(04:47):
so I can't know for sure, but I think he
wanted something on the gentler side, since Raca can sound brusque.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
But I didn't like it.
Speaker 1 (04:56):
At one point I thought maybe I should go by
al I mean, which had been crazy. I mean, like,
when I think about it, I'm not crazy. It just
would have sounded odd al Raca. I talked to one
of my former teachers about it. That day I visited
wood Acres. Her name is Miss Venisi, and she was
one of my all time favorites. She was patient, kind,
(05:20):
and impossibly glamorous. More about that in a bit. Turns
out she could have made a pretty decent therapist too.
Speaker 3 (05:27):
Now you said you didn't like your name, so were
you teased in school?
Speaker 6 (05:33):
You know.
Speaker 1 (05:33):
I don't know that I was ever teased for my name.
It just felt so different, it felt foreign. Everything changed
when I graduated from Wood Acres to Pile Middle School,
and oddly enough, it was thanks to the aptly named
Jeff Heebner.
Speaker 3 (05:49):
I know him, I mean, I remember him. He was
very blonde, very blonde.
Speaker 1 (05:53):
And when I went to Pile, it's kind of scary
all the elementary schools feeding into the big junior high
and the fizz ed teacher there of the first days
did roll call and said, you know, when I get
to your name, if you have a name you prefer
you as, I'll write it in the in the book.
Speaker 2 (06:08):
And then she said Maurice Rock.
Speaker 1 (06:10):
I said here, and then Jeff Heapner said, he's not Maurice,
He's Mo. And that's kind of how I got my.
Speaker 3 (06:17):
I was going to ask you, so Jeff just came
out with it and you preferred it obviously.
Speaker 2 (06:22):
Yeah, kind of I liked that.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
It was easy, yeah, and it kind of popped. But
now I love when people call me Maurice. So you
have to call me for this episode.
Speaker 2 (06:29):
I'm Maurice.
Speaker 3 (06:29):
I wasn't sure and what to call you, whether I
should call you, Maurice Amo.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
And if there's anyone who would understand this kind of
confusion over one's own name, it's Miss Vanisi, Mildred Vanisi.
Despite what those kids said earlier, Mildred Venisi is not British,
but the granddaughter of Italian immigrants.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
And there was a custom I doubt if it's still
in existence, that the firstborn I was the firstborn is
named either for the father's mother or the father's father,
of course, dependent upon the sex. My grandmother's name was Camella,
and I'm sure that my parents, being first generation, wanted
(07:12):
an anglicized name. Kamella's were called Milly. Millie is Mildred.
Speaker 1 (07:19):
Growing up, Miss Venisi didn't know any other Mildred's and
she didn't really like her name. Lucky for her, she
too got a nickname that eventually stuck.
Speaker 3 (07:29):
Somewhere along the line. I started being called Milly. Not
by family, my mother and father. I was still Mildred,
but my generation, my friends started calling me that. My
sisters call me Milly, and so now I introduced myself
that way. It just happened, just happened. I think the
name Millie flows better. It's a little more musical than Mildred.
(07:54):
I just think Mildred is harsh.
Speaker 1 (07:57):
She's not thoroughly modern Mildred.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
No, right, that wouldn't sound good. That just would not
sound good.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
I also never thought Mildred was an appropriate moniker for
Miss Venisi, with her luxuriant mane of dark curly hair,
her Jackie O sunglasses, her Jordash jeans or were they
Gloria Vanderbilt?
Speaker 6 (08:22):
Look?
Speaker 1 (08:22):
All I know is that no other teacher looked like
she just walked off the setup and Aaron spelling nighttime soap. Honestly,
Miss VANSI was so fabulous I could barely contain myself.
I don't know if you'll remember, so if you don't,
it's kind of like a confession.
Speaker 5 (08:37):
I guess.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
But I remember in fifth grade waiting outside the all
Purpose room for lunch. But when you walked by, I said, Hey,
what's shake and Millie? He wheeled around. Yeah, and I
think you said something like, did you ever call me
that again? I, Miss Venisi, I probably did.
Speaker 3 (09:00):
Teach.
Speaker 1 (09:02):
The name Mildred reached its peak in nineteen twenty, when
more than eighteen thousand babies were named Mildred. It was
the sixth most popular girls name that year popular enough
that there are a number of notable Mildreds throughout history.
Mildred J. Hill was the composer of Good Morning to All,
(09:23):
the melody of which became the Happy Birthday Song.
Speaker 3 (09:26):
And then that movie Mildred Piers with Germany Crawft that
must have been in the forties.
Speaker 6 (09:31):
Now I'm sure of one thing, at least, I want
my daughter back.
Speaker 1 (09:35):
Mildred Gillers an American who broadcast Nazi propaganda from Germany
during World War Two, also known as Axis Sally. She
was indicted after the war in charge with trees and Okay,
so that's not a good Mildred.
Speaker 3 (09:48):
That's not a good Mildred. But I think I've heard
of Axis Sally.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
But after hitting its popularity peak in the early twentieth century,
Mildred slowly slid down the list of the thousand most
popular names. In twenty seventeen, only eighty three newborn girls
were named Mildred in the US. Recent users on one
baby naming website dismissed the name as sounding too much
(10:13):
like Mildew wrote another makes me think of dreading something.
Speaker 3 (10:19):
I was the only Mildred in all my years at
school there was a period of time when a lot
of girls are named Karen, and there was another period
of time where a lot of girls name Janet. I
don't know, but I just think that names have cycles,
and maybe something triggers.
Speaker 1 (10:37):
It, as she so often was when I was growing up.
Mildred Venisi is right.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
Coming up.
Speaker 1 (10:48):
I'm going to talk with linguist John mcwardo about what
makes names pretty, prickly or popular. But first in in
memoriam for another name that left us, Hortense. We hardly
knew you. Despite your French origins. Your name lacked the crisp,
bright bubbliness of champagne and the addictive qualities of your
(11:12):
country's cheeses. Disney must have had a thing for you,
because Hortense McDuck is Donald Duck's mother. Donald gets an
ostrich named Hortense, and his uncle Scrooge McDuck named his
horse Hortense Alas Disney was never going to create a
princess Hortense as a name, You're just not pretty. You
(11:33):
barely cracked the top four hundred names in the US
around the turn of the twentieth century, and you slid
off the top one thousand after nineteen forty one. Now,
ordensia does have a nice frame to it. It's the
Spanish version of hortense or densia also means hydrangia. To
be clear, I'm not suggesting anyone named their daughter hydrangea hortense.
(11:56):
You are strictly past tense, gone, and yes forgotten. To
understand better why names come and go, I talked with
an expert, Columbia University Associates Professor of Comparative literature and
(12:17):
linguist John mcward. How did you become a John?
Speaker 5 (12:21):
I'm John Hamilton mcwarter the fifth, and John Hamilton mccuorter
the first was a slave, So I was named because
of that relentless succession and the idea that you don't
break it. And as a matter of fact, I know
if my father hadn't been John Hamilton mcquarter the fourth,
I would be named Bruce. That's what my mother would
have chosen. And I would have named my son John,
(12:42):
except he's a girl, and so the name had to
stop with my two girls. So she has my middle.
Speaker 1 (12:48):
Name, Johanna. In Italian, you'd have Johnny and Johanna in
English Johnette, none of them. That just sounds like a
tiny little bathroom. We live in an efficiency. We only
have room for a John after John mcwarter was born
in nineteen sixty five, when John was the second most
(13:08):
popular name in the country, and the name John isn't
going away. It's still in the top thirty names for
boys in the US. But if you go back in
time to the early twentieth century, John was far and
away the number one boy's name. America was producing John's
in mass quantities. It was like the model t of names.
(13:29):
In fact, if you were born in that era, it
was really common for you to have a name that
was in the top ten. People just seemed to want
to fit in.
Speaker 5 (13:39):
You go back to that time and there is a
sense of what a normal American person is that would
strike us today as almost bizarrely homogenous. And that's not
to say that there weren't some ripples going on around
the edges, but there was a certain sense that America was,
you know, turkey and apple pie, and that's what one was.
(13:59):
One was very, very very white.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Well that's so interesting because aren't there those are competing impulses, right.
I want my child to have a name that makes
him or her special. I also want my child to
have a name that makes him or her fit in.
Speaker 2 (14:15):
And that right.
Speaker 5 (14:16):
So and back then, no special. I mean, if you
think of somebody naming their child in eighteen sixty five,
most people did not want something that would make the
child feel special, or it would be something going on
with the middle name, something that was less known. You
might play with it.
Speaker 1 (14:30):
Even when I was in school in the seventies and eighties,
I remember the popular names were really popular. Oh yeah,
I mean in junior high I was drowning in Jennifer's.
Speaker 5 (14:42):
Oh, they were everywhere. That's right.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
What was going on?
Speaker 5 (14:44):
Jennifers and Jenny's.
Speaker 1 (14:46):
That's right, there's so many Jennifers. Oh, it was a
tsunami of them in school.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Seven Jennifers.
Speaker 1 (14:56):
But the days of a few names dominating are over.
At its peak, a full five percent of all newborn
male babies were named John one in twenty Fast forward
to twenty twenty one, and the top names for females
and males, Olivia and Liam, made up only around one
percent of babies born that year. In other words, the
(15:19):
most popular names are less popular. Parents today shoot for originality.
Speaker 5 (15:26):
There's a sense that if you're going to name a child.
You spontaneously reach out and you think, how can we
have a little bit of fun with this, so you
don't want to torture your child. I once knew this
poor little boy. His parents had named him Rotunda Thanksgiving Jones. Oh,
and it was because he was born when John F.
Kennedy was laid out in the rotunda, and they named
(15:48):
him Thanksgiving just because, and of course he was made
fun of.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
It sounds like a song, and have forgotten Gershwin musical.
Speaker 5 (15:55):
That's because there were songs like that Rotunda Thanksgiving. Gents,
you can and this guy really had that name. It's
a tragic thing, but you want your child to be
somewhat different, probably not too different, but I think most
people think not the average thing, unless it's named after
a grandparent or a father or something like that.
Speaker 1 (16:16):
John mcwarter says that trend towards uniqueness and away from
uniformity tracks with broader changes in American society.
Speaker 5 (16:25):
I think it's very much a spirit of individuality, and
of course many people would say that the spirit of
individuality is part of what being an American is. But
there's an extreme that happens, and I think it happens
after the nineteen sixties, with the sense of what was
called the Me generation in the seventies, and then the
greater respect for and awareness of the diversity of americannesses
(16:47):
that you get that really becomes default starting in the eighties.
That's when a certain browning of the culture happens. Think
about nineteen eighty four is when The Cosby Show becomes
a big hit. Vanessa Williams becomes the first black Miss
America and I new Miss America.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
There's Mavnasillams.
Speaker 5 (17:08):
Beverly Hills. Cop is almost the biggest selling movie in
the country. You know, this is the cleanest and nicest
police card ever been.
Speaker 4 (17:17):
In in my life.
Speaker 5 (17:17):
That's only eighty four and that's just black diversity. I
think we've become much more comfortable with America not just
being my three sons starting in the nineteen eighties.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
As a part of that change, there's a shift in
naming traditions, especially among Black Americans. Nineteen eighty is a
particularly interesting year for naming kids. That year, sixty percent
of black girls are given a unique name, one that
no one else has. Mcwarterur points out that after the
civil rights movement of the nineteen sixties, afrocentrism gained traction
(17:51):
in the seventies and eighties.
Speaker 5 (17:53):
So once you get past integration as the watch cry,
and there's a certain kind of in some ways healthy
separatism that's afoot, then it becomes natural to be comfortable
making up a name. And so what happens, frankly is
I've often thought that black girls in particular tend to
have more interesting names because it's considered okay to just
(18:14):
make it up. And what you get are all of
these beautiful African style names for people born in the
United States. And it's all rather pretty, but it really explodes,
especially with the sense of Africa and the African heritage
rising in the nineteen seventies. That's when you get little
girls named Mikiba.
Speaker 1 (18:33):
Well, I'm going to impress you right now and tell you,
and I'm sorry if it sounds boastful. In college, I
was in a production of Little Shop of Horrors with
Katanji Brown now Katanji Brown Jackson. I was Seymour, thank
you very much. She was run at and she was fantastic.
She was fantastically you notice, yeah, and she yeah, she
(18:55):
was not Crystal. I'm suddenly forging thelast one's name. But anyways,
did improv comedy together? But her name, I know you've
written about her name improv. H Wow, she thinks really funny?
Speaker 5 (19:07):
Is she funny? She is?
Speaker 2 (19:08):
I'm telling you.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
We will because we are going to make sure that
hearings are now you know, the simulcast on Comedy Central.
I because she's that funny.
Speaker 5 (19:19):
I want to know that about her. Yeah, that's a
perfect example that her name is Katanji. If she were
a generation older, her name would probably be Carolyn. But
now it is Katanji Brown Jackson. And that's ordinary starting
especially with women of her generation. It's nice to see.
I mean, Katanji is a much more interesting name than Carolyn.
Speaker 1 (19:37):
But one group of people, we expect original names from celebrities.
It's practically a rite of passage. The first time I
can remember this happening is in two thousand and four
when Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin named their daughter Apple.
At the time it was weird. Now totally normal. Kylie
Jenner has a daughter named Stormy, and it's not with
(20:00):
a y, it's with an eye at the end. Yeah,
And Elon Musk has won that somebody can pronounce it's
a bunch of symbols. I think by the way I
looked it up, it's pronounced x ash a twelve.
Speaker 5 (20:11):
All of that is because they are public figures, and
so for them, naming is a public act. And if
it's going to be a public act, then you want
to do something that's going to stand out rather than
something that's going to bore people. If somebody like Gwyneth
Paltrow sets off a tradition, next thing, you know, everybody's
doing it.
Speaker 1 (20:26):
So it's sort of a celebrity contagion in a way.
Speaker 5 (20:29):
I think I would put it just that way. What
Jay Z and Beyonce Blue Ivy. That's really beautiful, but
it's not African. It's not the usual tradition. That's something
they came up with all by themselves, as people who
knew that everybody was watching them having that child. So
that's where you get that tradition. And that seems to
actually cut across races with celebrities too. Yeah, it's it's
(20:52):
a show. It's a it's a kind of display, And
I don't mean that in a bad way.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Most parents aren't going to resort to their kids after
a combination of math aircraft and Elvin symbols representing artificial intelligence,
which is what Musk's baby's name represents. But throughout history,
parents have often taken naming cues from pop culture. Well,
I'm going to quiz you on it right now. Actually
it's really fun, so I'll start off really easy. Shirley
(21:21):
saw a dramatic spike between nineteen thirty two and nineteen
thirty five because of I wish mother.
Speaker 5 (21:26):
Hair of Little Shirley Temple. And if you think about it,
nobody is named Shirley before then, and then all of
a sudden, everybody's grandmother is named Shirley by the late
twentieth century, and now the name is impossible. Meet little Shirley.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
Never Michelle entered the top twenty in nineteen sixty five
because that was the same year.
Speaker 5 (21:47):
It has to be because of that song.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
My Bell.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
Yeah, the Beatles song.
Speaker 5 (21:56):
Nobody is named Michelle. Maybe in France ants you're just
kind of guessing, but not here, I mean you Michelle's.
Speaker 1 (22:04):
Yeah, we've got a lot of Michelle's running around, women
named Michelle.
Speaker 5 (22:07):
Women, but not here, not before then.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
Oh, I see what you're saying, Like, there's.
Speaker 5 (22:12):
No first lady named Michelle. Right, and if you think
about it, Michelle there was no first lady name Michelle
good point right, only only after and she's named around that.
Speaker 1 (22:22):
Time Michelle Polk.
Speaker 5 (22:24):
No Michelle Quincatams, Michelle quin No suffragette named Michelle, you
know that's that's right, it's Michelle Katie's.
Speaker 1 (22:36):
The name Layelah first appeared in the top one thousand
in nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 5 (22:42):
No, why then.
Speaker 1 (22:47):
Eric Clapton song Whoops, Yeah, I'm.
Speaker 5 (22:50):
Not as good at modern pop.
Speaker 2 (22:51):
Now, that's fine.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
I love that you and I have the same definition
of modern pop. Nineteen seventy two.
Speaker 5 (22:57):
Everything ends.
Speaker 1 (23:00):
So this is a trick question. Rosanna shot up in
nineteen eighty two because of that Toto song, Right, yes,
I interviewed Patricia Arquette. That song was named after her sister,
also an actress, But Patricia pointed out to me that
her sister's name is really pronounced Rosanna.
Speaker 3 (23:21):
I'm Rosanna Arquette, and.
Speaker 1 (23:23):
I'm so they got the pronunciation of her name wrong.
Speaker 6 (23:28):
Hi, Ronald Reagan, do solemnly swear, Hi, Ronald Reagan, do
solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the office of
President of the United States at Iowa Faith.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
After Reagan became president in the eighties, the name Reagan,
not Ronald as much, but the name Reagan surged in popularity,
landing in the top one hundred by twenty twelve. Now
here's what I think is fascinating is that Republican parents
were more likely to pick the name Reagan for their
kid if they lived in a district that was purple,
(24:00):
that was sort of evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.
Then you make a statement exactly, then if they weren't
a deep red Republican enclave.
Speaker 5 (24:08):
Right, then they don't need to stand out, They don't
need to stake their individuality exactly. And of course they
weren't thinking of this consciously. So much goes on subconsciously.
I doubt any of those families said, so many people
around here vote Democratic, that let's name her Reagan. It
was just part of the warp and wolf of their
psychology because of sensing themselves as a minority or as
(24:28):
not more than half of their district. Well, that's fascinating. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (24:32):
And if you're in a purple district and you name
your kid Reagan, do you plant the kid on the
front lawn during election time.
Speaker 5 (24:41):
That's right, mommy, how long do I have to stand here?
Speaker 1 (24:48):
Spend some time with the Social Security Administration's baby named database,
and you'll see a sort of pendulum swing over the
last century, especially among girls. Half of the most popular girls'
names started with vowels in the eighteen eighties. Then we're
all consonants. By nineteen fifty, Anna and Emma became Patricia
(25:09):
and Deborah. Now vowels are back in a big way.
It makes you wonder why.
Speaker 5 (25:16):
Certainly in terms of how we perceive beauty, at least
in English and in related languages, vowels are beautiful because
they involve no obstruction of the airflow. Stop sounds such
as those are the ugliest sounds because you have to stop.
Those are the ones that you're calling the jabbing sounds.
Then there's everything in between, so you get a buzz
(25:40):
at least you get a hiss, and then with yeah,
whoa those might as well be vowels. So having more
vowels now could have something to do with people looking
for a certain mollifluousness in names. Now why people would
have valued it more during the McKinley administration than during
the Coolidge administers. I have no idea. I get the
(26:02):
feeling that is random.
Speaker 1 (26:04):
Statistical flutter mc water says that over time, fashions change gradually,
and something you once found repellent you now find irresistible.
Speaker 5 (26:15):
You know how, today, if you have a dinner party,
every second time you have brussel sprouts, probably with bacon
or something like that, imagine how unthinkable that was. Say,
even as recently as twenty five years ago, you didn't
give people you liked brussel sprouts.
Speaker 1 (26:27):
You did not russels sprouts or were synonymous with something
that was visible torture.
Speaker 5 (26:34):
Torture, Yeah, I mean little cabbages. They sucked, and so
you wouldn't give them to anybody. And you don't even
have to dress them up that much now we're used
to them. That's partly fashion. I don't think that the
Brussels sprout's lobby created this. Sometime early in the George W.
Bush administration.
Speaker 1 (26:48):
One recent trend boys' names ending in a certain consonant.
What is this with all these boys today? Baby boys
having an N at the end of their We've got
all these logans, Masons, Ethan's, Jackson's.
Speaker 5 (27:05):
We subconsciously associate that un with a kind of a
gracious masculinity. It's what you want to name your little boy.
Speaker 1 (27:12):
As opposed to Jack, which is always too severe.
Speaker 5 (27:15):
Jack might be a bully. Yeah, not only old fashioned,
but Jack Jack's people up. You know, Ethan has conversations.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
You imagine Ethan is open to change, like he's right, right.
Speaker 5 (27:28):
He reasons right. Ethan reasons as opposed to Jack, who
just sits yeah.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
But even names that hit that right mix of vowels
and and just right, ones that are pined after in
song or become famous in the names of movie characters
or the actors who play them. Well, just like we
as a society can birth the name, we can also
let it die. But first another in memoriam for sid
(27:59):
stan irv Cy, Shelley, and Morty. No, they weren't the
original white staff at the Carnegie Deli. In the late
eighteen hundreds, Sidney, Stanley, Irving, Seymour, Sheldon, and Morton were
all popular baby boy names with WASP that is, White
Anglo Saxon Protestant parents. Then in the late nineteen twenties,
(28:21):
many American Jewish parents began choosing these names for their
baby boys to help them fit in. But America's wasps
apparently felt stung and took flight from these names. Soon enough, Sidney, Stanley, Irving, Seymour, Sheldon,
and Morton were seen as stereotypically Jewish, and their assimilation
(28:42):
value greatly diminished. As documented by sociologist Stanley Lieberson, American
Jews eventually abandoned the names as well. Incidentally, another name
in that category was Morris, a sort of cousin to Maurice,
but at least Morris was the name of a terrifically
droll tabby who used to sell cat food on TV commercials.
Speaker 6 (29:05):
Nine Live Seafood Pladder anchors away.
Speaker 1 (29:16):
Pop culture and big news events can correlate with names surging,
even when those events are disasters. After Hurricane Katrina, names
that began with the letter K actually jumped by nine percent,
according to an analysis by professors at Wharton Business School.
The sheer repetition of the name Katrina, it seems, had
(29:37):
a subliminal effect that K sound got stuck in people's heads.
But the name Katrina itself, well, Katrina had been a
pretty popular name and even broke the top one hundred
for a while in the late seventies and eighties. After
the storm, though the name quickly fell out of fashion
and in twenty thirteen dropped out of the top one
(29:58):
thousand entirely. Indeed, history can be a name killer as well.
The name Isis saw a burst of popularity in the
early nineteen seventies thanks to a Saturday Morning superhero of
the same name, and.
Speaker 6 (30:13):
Found she was heir to the sacrets of Isis.
Speaker 1 (30:17):
And so it has since fallen out of favor with
the rise of the Islamic State, which I find reassuring.
But Bertha toppled from a much greater height. In nineteen eighteen,
mothers birthed more than five thousand Berthas. Try saying that
five times fast. So what happened to Bertha? Well, Bertha
(30:41):
was the name of a German heiress to krupp Ag,
a German weapons manufacturer, and during World War One the
company began making heavy guns. Those guns were dubbed big
Berthas by the Germans. The Allies then this nickname that
was being called the Big Bertha, and they began using
(31:03):
it for all heavy artillery, so it suddenly became synonymous
with big heavy portly right.
Speaker 5 (31:09):
Right, yeah, So the next thing you know, Bertha is overweight.
Is it's associated with being large?
Speaker 1 (31:15):
That's linguished John mcwater again. But is there also something
about just the sound of it birth thought? I mean it,
I'm thinking of girth birth.
Speaker 5 (31:26):
The error is not pretty because it's not as open
as other vowel sounds. The thuh is a little unpleasant,
and it begins with a stop consonant. But er, I
mean it's it's nasty in that way. But then, especially
just because it was associated with something that was portly.
Speaker 1 (31:42):
I work with a woman who was telling me about
a person in her neighborhood that she doesn't like, and
she said, oh, I cut her a wide berth.
Speaker 5 (31:51):
And it's a wide berth. Right. I never thought about that, right, Yeah.
And you wonder why that expression catches on? Yeah?
Speaker 1 (31:57):
Boy, I wonder what it would take for Bertha to
come back, Hi, Bertha, I don't see it. After World
War One, Bertha faded into obscurity and was off the
top one thousand list by the mid nineteen eighties. But
a name doesn't have to become synonymous with military weaponry
(32:20):
or get added to a terrorist watch list to fade.
Speaker 5 (32:23):
Sometimes names just wear out. They fall out of the
rotation in the same way you'll find a shirt that
you really like and it still fits, and it's in
your closet and you haven't worn it for five years
for no real reason. A name with ugly sounds can
last almost a counterintuitively long time. For example, Richard, what
an ugly name that is? And think about how much
(32:44):
uglier the nickname is, and how there were, until about
ten minutes ago, normal male people running around in Anglophone
America named Dick and nobody bad at a nine. It
wasn't only Dick sargent at dick yorke. I knew a
Dick back in the eighties.
Speaker 1 (33:01):
Has anything to do with the wedshed.
Speaker 5 (33:04):
Dick Lincoln, and he was taken seriously as an executive.
Only with the past generation or two has that stop.
And not only is dick ridiculous and dick was used
to mean what it meant long before it went out,
but dick is an ugly word by these standards.
Speaker 1 (33:18):
Composer Cole Porter would beg to differ many time.
Speaker 6 (33:26):
Time.
Speaker 1 (33:34):
One of the other names I've been pondering is Todd.
Todd showed up in the thirties and just grew and grew.
We hit peak Todd in nineteen sixty four. More than
fifteen thousand were born that year. I used to know
tons of Todd's, but now I haven't met a baby
Todd in decades. What do you think the appeal was
(33:55):
in the first place.
Speaker 5 (33:56):
I think it's partly because ah is the most basic
sound and humanity. It's the first sound that babies make.
And then with Todd, what you have is a kind
of a nice assonance, as it were, because tou and
duh are the same sound but different. Duah is too,
with a little bit of belly in it, so you
don't have to make a change. There was something pleasant
(34:18):
about Todd. Todd was like a little white potato that's
one of those little balls and it's boiled just right.
Speaker 1 (34:28):
That's like Todd, like a tater Todd. Yes, I guess
he would have to be deep fried as well as
Todd off and a lovely woman named Millie with a
hairnet giving it to you. Personally. I like Todd, and
I brought in one of my favorite Todds to defend
(34:49):
his name, Todd Bridges. Todd Bridges was born in nineteen
sixty five, just one year after peak Todd, and when
he was a teenager, he got a starring role in
the hit TV show Different Strokes as Willis Jackson, opposite
Gary Coleman as Arnold.
Speaker 4 (35:07):
Yeah, Phyllis is in.
Speaker 5 (35:08):
Man, Why don't you ask her? How Arnold?
Speaker 4 (35:09):
Are you kidding? So starter?
Speaker 1 (35:11):
She doesn't even known me.
Speaker 4 (35:13):
My mom said that she dreamed my name because there's
not very many black Todd's. I don't know if you
know that or not, but there isn't. I think I
know Todd Gurley, the football player, and that's about it.
I don't think I know anybody else named Todd.
Speaker 5 (35:27):
That's right.
Speaker 1 (35:28):
Even though Todd was near its peak when Bridges was born,
it was indeed as white as those potatoes.
Speaker 4 (35:34):
And I'll tell you what happened, which is really funny.
One time I got a check somewhere that I was
living at and it said Todd Bridges and I'm looking,
I don't know of his company, and it's for a
couple thousand dollars. I'm like, I know, I say, this
is not me. So what happened was the postman thought
it was me, and it was an address down the street,
and I went down the street and bringing the bell
and I go, hey, man, is there a Todd Bridges.
(35:55):
He goes, yeah, it's me, and he goes, oh, hey Todd.
I go, hey Todd, and I gave him it was his.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
There's another Todd Bridges right down the street.
Speaker 4 (36:03):
It was right down the street fromhere I used to
live at. Yeah, another guy was a white guy.
Speaker 1 (36:06):
That's kind of crazy. People get their names made fun
of for all sorts of reasons. Is there anything you
can do with Todd? Were you ever teased?
Speaker 4 (36:14):
Well, a lot of people thought that Todd was short
for Theodore, but I'm like, no, that's Ted.
Speaker 5 (36:20):
That show for Theodore.
Speaker 4 (36:21):
Todd is just Todd.
Speaker 1 (36:23):
Then in the nineteen seventies, Todd fell off the baby naming.
Speaker 4 (36:27):
Cliff oh Man. Todd fell off the Matt dang.
Speaker 1 (36:31):
In twenty fifteen, there were only two hundred and twelve
baby boys named Todd. And did you ever consider naming
any of your children Todd?
Speaker 4 (36:41):
No? No. I named my son Spencer, but I spelled
it differently, Okay, I mean we spelled his SPN C
I R. And it's been serious.
Speaker 1 (36:55):
Now, why did you do that?
Speaker 4 (36:57):
We just thought it'd make it just original because Spencer
is out there and it's you know, SBN cer. We
just wanted to make it original, and it's original.
Speaker 1 (37:03):
Spencer, it totally is. George Carlin had a whole bit
a routine in two thousand and one where he actually
made fun of the name Todd.
Speaker 2 (37:12):
He made fun of a number of he really did.
Speaker 4 (37:14):
I didn't see that.
Speaker 5 (37:14):
What did he say?
Speaker 4 (37:16):
And I'm getting.
Speaker 1 (37:16):
Really sick a guy's name Todd?
Speaker 4 (37:20):
You know, Yeah, it's just a goofy.
Speaker 5 (37:22):
It's a goofy fucking name.
Speaker 4 (37:23):
Okay, Hi, what's your name? Todd? Is he still around?
Speaker 1 (37:28):
He is not still around, but great stand.
Speaker 4 (37:31):
He is lucky because I'd have to go choke him
out messing with my name. It's not a goofy name.
It's a cool name. It's Todd.
Speaker 1 (37:51):
We end this episode with a nod to Western civilization's
earliest baby naming book, the Bible. From Adam and Eve
to Ahab and Jezebel, there are well over a thousand
different names mentioned between the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament.
People have been blessing and sometimes saddling their kids with
(38:13):
the names of patriarchs and prophets patriarchs in magi for
over one thousand years. The most recently popular baby names
in the us have included Jonah, Elijah, Naomi, and Noah.
I was surprised to see that even the name Lazarus
has risen from the dead. Of course, not every biblical
name is heaven sent. Judas, if we ignore your history
(38:37):
for a second, you're not terrible. Your spelling makes sense,
and you have no off putting hard consonants. Then again,
your behavior toward Jesus was more.
Speaker 2 (38:47):
Than off putting.
Speaker 1 (38:49):
Your name has been permanently shunned. Earlier biblical outcasts haven't
fared much better. Sure, there were three hundred Canes born
in twenty fifteen, but nearly ten ten times as many
Abeles were born that year. It doesn't pay to kill
your brother. Jesus, of course, is a popular name, especially
as Heesus. But Judas, I don't see you ever cracking
(39:11):
the top one thousand.
Speaker 5 (39:13):
Come here, little Judas, Yeah, there are more than time
for your dip.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
They're not.
Speaker 5 (39:23):
Friendless, dateless little boy.
Speaker 1 (39:26):
Esther and Ruth your solid names, if not always easy
to say. Hey, Esther, meet me at Ruth's Christ's Steakhouse.
You're the only two women with books of the Bible
named after you. But after the nineteen thirties, your name's
made a quick exodus, Yet history shows us that most
names are cyclical. What's old, sometimes very old is new again. Indeed, Genesis,
(39:52):
the very first book of the Bible, has seen a
surge in popularity as a first name since the nineteen nineties. PS.
If you ever see me out on the street, feel
free to call me Maurice. I kind of miss it.
(40:12):
I certainly hope you enjoyed this Mobituary. May I ask
you to please rate and review our podcast. You can
also follow Mobituaries on Facebook and Instagram, and you can
follow me on Twitter at Morocca. Hear all new episodes
of Mobituaries every Wednesday wherever you get your podcasts, and
check out Mobituaries. Great Lives Worth Reliving, the New York
(40:36):
Times best selling book, now available in paperback and audiobook.
It includes plenty of stories not in the podcast. This
episode of Mobituaries was produced by Jake Harper and Aaron Schrank.
Our team of producers also includes Wilcoe Martinez Caccero, and
me Mo Roca. It was edited by Mara Walls and
(40:57):
engineered by Sam Bear, with fact checking by Naomi Barr.
Our production company is Neon Humm Media. Our archival producer
is Jamie Benson. Our theme music is written by Daniel Hart.
Indispensable support from Craig Schwegler, Dustin Gervais, Alan Pang, Reggie
(41:18):
Bazil and everyone at CBS News Radio. Special thanks to
Megan Marcus, Alberto Robina and the staff of wood Acres Elementary.
The inimitable Aaron Schrank is our senior producer. Executive producers
for Mobituaries include Steve Razis and Morocca. The series is
(41:40):
created by Yours truly and as always undying gratitude to
Rand Morrison and John Carp for helping breathe life into
Mobituaries
Host
Mo Rocca
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.
24/7 News: The Latest
Today’s Latest News In 4 Minutes. Updated Hourly.