Silly names

This article in the Times about how the British chose the names for their kids is pretty funny, and quite accurate for Australia too, I think:

By and large, of course, it’s wise to try to avoid making decisions that will last the rest of your life when you’re 14. One of the primary arguments against teenage pregnancy — but one that the Government has, as yet, been too scared to address — is that 13-year-old girls tend to bestow awful names. Names which commit to an implacable destiny. Indeed, Destiny is one of them. Destineee is even more one of them. It’s hard to imagine a Governor of the Bank of England called Chantelle. Not least because the headline the next day would be “Oh my God!”, and the Bank of England would have to be renamed the Bank of Blingland. ....

The main difference between chav names and ponce ones is that the working classes deploy names that reflect success in the present — Ashanti, Britney, Justin. This is because, for the working classes, there is no rose-spectacled nostalgia for the past. The further you go back in time, the more incrementally awful it was to be poor. For the working classes, there’s no time like the present — or, indeed, the future.

The middle classes, on the other hand, have no fear of the past — when, as far as they’re concerned, all food was organic and free-range, and children played in streams all day while wearing lovely smocks. To reflect this longing for a simple, earthy, “real” childhood, they give their children the names that the working classes in their grandparents’ era would have favoured: Ruby, Charlie, Mabel, Fred.