Welcome to the Cellar, aimeecc. :D
That's an interesting perspective.

My sister's name was very common -my middle name more so. I feel your pain, aimee. That's why my children have to suffer their unusual burdens :lol:

Glatt - be assured, its a cool name. It meets the test of "not too out there" (how many people know the current Dali Lama's name anyway?), and not an item (like apple or moon), but not common. Its easily pronounced - even if you've never seen the name before. Although I had never heard it before, it did not strike me as "that's weird". Its unusual, yes, but not freakish.

Monster - thanks. My husband and I picked Miles for our son. Not many of those, and its a name that other people have been named in the past, so its not "out there". However it seems we hear Miles more now - as the secondary roles in movies that we really don't aspire our son to be (Miles in Transformers was the main characters weird friend, and Miles is the name of the assassin in Assassins Creed).
What did you name your kids?

http://cellar.org/showpost.php?p=304320&postcount=29 :D

I understand the desire to name a child something that is not common. With our first child, we went out of our way to find an old family name that wasn't in use much any more. Isabel. Even did research and saw that it was something like number 280 on the list the year before. The Spanish version, Isabella, was a little more popular but was still very rare. When we put her in preschool, there was another Isabel in her class of 15. They even have last names that start with the same letter, so initials for the last names wouldn't work either. Everywhere Isabel goes, it seems like there is another Isabel there. The only name that is more common in Arlington seems to be Emily.

For our son, we didn't try to be different. We named him Adam. There are no other Adams around. The lesson is don't bother trying to be different, just like everyone else.

This is where I usually talk about the name Susan. I think of it as a common name, but it's extremely exotic. There were something like 400 Susans born in the entire US last year.

We named our youngest Ivy, only to realize our foolishness a couple of months later when a bratty little boy in a restaurant said "like poison ivy?"

If Miles was a girl, the name we picked out was Isabelle, after my husband's grandmother - much like what you did. Not only did his cousin pick that name for her daughter that was born 2 months before Miles, but then it turned out to be on the top baby girl names list. So we lucked out with Miles being a boy and not having to figure out another girl name. We haven't actually met any other Miles (yet).

your links are not working.

at least not working well... where do you get your "400 susans" information? The baby name gadget I was able to find at the link you offered a ranking of popularity of a given name, not the number of individuals with a given name... unless I'm looking in the wrong place.

There were four "Kimberly J. Smith"s in my college freshman class of about 2,000. I'm guessing it was all but impossible for them to make it through four years without getting confused at least a couple times.

Can't get anything past you, can I BigV? :blush:

Sorry. That first link was broken. I was trying to be all clever by linking the results of a Cellar search where I had mentioned this "Susan" phenomenon in old threads. In a thread back in 2004, I posted that "Susan" had been used 550 times in the previous year. I didn't provide a link then, but a cached google page backs this figure up, especially when you compare it to the figure I gave for Emily in the same post. So I figured that if back in 2003, Susan was the ... crap, now I see that my second link was broken too. Linking to search results doesn't work well.

Well anyway, if you go to http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ and put "Susan" in the "Popularity of a name" search box, you will see that it was number 2 way back in the late 50's and was 511th back in 2003, when there were 550 of them in the country. Last year, it was 611th in popularity. I totally guessed at the 400 number, but figure it is pretty close, because it used to be 550 and has fallen in popularity significantly. Maybe I'm off by 100 or so, but it's got to be in the ballpark.

A granddaugher named Stormy Cheyenne. My neice named some of her brood from the good book? Maybe Shadrrack, Neishack and ??????Well maybe not that. But close.

This baby name wizard is one of the best flash apps I've ever seen. Enter "susan" at the prompt to see how the name came into usage and then fell out of favor.

glatt:

I don't know why you think you're special.... people get stuff by me alllllll the time.

as for the 400/susan thang... I still don't agree/understand.

I read the link and page stuffs.. My understanding is that the name Susan is the 400th (I accept your rounding, fine) **most popular name** for the given period.

Not that there were only 400 people named Susan for the given period.

Caddyshack and Radioshack?