August 12, 2007
Freds and History Posted by Fredric Smoler at 03:10 PM EST This group blog is unusual in having three contributors named Fred. Fred, once a common name, is now a relatively rare one; from 1885 to 1896, it was the fifteenth most popular boy’s baby name, but now it is no longer in the top 1,000. I know this last detail because one of the two Fred bloggers circulated this piece from the Washington Post to the other two Freds. It is a bit of journalistic whimsy provoked by the as-yet-unannounced presidential candidacy of Fred Thompson, and it generated a brief intra-Fred exchange of views on the name. I don’t know how one quickly determines the frequency of names for most historical periods, but for the United States in 1990, the Census Bureau has put the data online at http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/freqnames.html, and as recently as 1990 Fred was still the seventy-first most popular name for a male American. Name frequency does change over time, sometimes quite sharply, and one theory for the phenomenon is that nowadays most Americans want names for their children that are uncommon but not too uncommon, so success in finding such a name leads to overkill. The name can catch on very broadly, in which case after a while it necessarily drops into relative obscurity. The census data tells nothing about the specific mental associations of particular names, but on the strength of the Washington Post piece, my own view, which is that the name Fred has long connoted affable stupidity, seems to be shared by a significant number of Americans. I don’t know why this should be so, but I have just been told—by neither Fred-blogger—that the two fictional Freds mentioned in the WaPo article, Fred Flintstone and Fred Mertz, both share the qualities of affability and at least mild stupidity, and this may explain the aura now surrounding the name; there was a further speculation that Fred Flintstone is named by mental association with Fred Mertz. This implies that one fictional Fred damned a whole tribe with a reputation for sweet-tempered doltishness, which seems odd, but I can think of few other possible explanations. I don’t think problem is literary association, because there are few Freds in high literature—off the top of my head, I recall only Fred Vincy in Middlemarch, and he is not doltish. There is Frederic Moreau in Sentimental Education, who is not stupid, but that is immaterial, for a co-blogger has pointed out that Frederics do not have the same reputation for sappiness. There are a fair number of stupid and affable Freds in P. G. Wodehouse, but an awful lot of Wodehouse characters are affable and stupid, not just the Freds. All of this leads to the thought that while more things have a history than we often think—I remember being quite startled to discover how rapidly the choice of American Christian names has come to change over time, versus how slowly French usage has changed, at least until quite recently (it was long controlled by law)—not all of history is readily explicable.
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