Do you really need a name book?

So, over the weekend we grabbed the ubiquitous baby name book.

Actually, there's a whole section of them at your average Borders...a shocking array screaming an ever expanding vernacular of names. Its like an arms race: The 600 Best Baby Names; 1,000 Names for Your Baby; The Coolest 10,000 Baby Names on the Planet!

I highly doubt that anyone needs a book of 100,000 names. Or 10,000 names. Or...probably even 1,000 names. Most parents digging that deep are likely to just make something stupid up anyway. Like Blanket. It reminds me of some of the names that teacher friends have had in class...Lenore Lemmons...Notorious Quintangelo Jones...Courvoisier Jones... Do you think those came from a baby book?

Or Marijuana Pepsi Jackson? Did her parents grab that out of an expanded edition of the Million Worst Names to Give Your Kids, volume 3? (And that is not meant to be a diss on Ms. Jackson who is clearly doing incredibly well!)

We ended up dropping $20 on The Best Baby Names Treasury. It was the last one standing as we went back and forth about whether we should get the book with popularity graphs, or just keep it simple with the name, language and definition as is more common... But no matter, it was a stupid purchase because half the people reading this blog right now have an equally useless name book sitting around their house that we could have borrowed---or that they would have happily given us just to clean up the bookshelves a bit...but whatever. The book boasts over 100,001 names and 250+ "fresh lists."

But really...how fresh can the names be?

Judging from the vast majority of names in play for us...a list of, say, 500 names would likely have sufficed.

But it is interesting to see the most popular names of the last 100 years, broken down by decades (and state!). Michael's been pretty popular...whodda guessed? Or a list of first names based on baseball parks for the fanatic fan dad (Camden and Turner, sure---but Kauffman and Wrigley are pushing it I'd say). Or the rocker names (in case you want to name your kid after Lars Ullrich).

Come March...this is an open invitation to any of you to save your cash and borrow our tome...