Baby Name Wizard's Names of the Year

Laura Wattenberg of the influential Baby Name Wizard blog has announced the top three names of 2007.

Second runner-up: Delilah, "rising despite biblical infamy," thanks mostly to the ubiquity of the Plain White T's song "Hey There Delilah."

First runner-up: Chuck, "a fascinating study in the machinations of style." Chuck was the nom de l'année in popular media during 2007: there's an NBC series called Chuck and a couple of be-Chucked movies, I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry and Good Luck Chuck. (There's even a female Chuck--née Charlotte Charles--in the ABC series Pushing Daisies. "Sunny, with moxie to spare," is her capsule bio.) "Producers loved the way Chuck conveys the message that 'this character isn't about image,'" Wattenberg observes. We've come a long way from Chucky.

Official 2007 name of the year: Barack, "a watershed for baby-name diversity in American politics." Wattenberg devotes more than 700 words to a discussion of Barack and other presidential-candidate names in U.S. history. Well worth reading.

Photo: Hedy Lamarr as Delilah in the 1949 film Samson and Delilah. Source: WomenIntheBible.net.

Comments

[Jessica]

When my beloved grandma Ethel, may she rest in peace, first met my brother-in-law Chuck, she proclaimed "That's not a name, it's meat." Talk about a phrase I can't let go of after all these years! So I'm not quite there with the cachet yet.