August 12, 2007
Freds and History II Posted by John Steele Gordon at 06:00 PM EST I long ago noted that the people who blog for American Heritage were disproportionately named Fred—25 percent of the total and 37.5 percent of the male bloggers. But it might also be noted that each of them spells his full first name differently—Frederick, Frederic, and Fredric. I wonder if the diversity of ways to spell the name contributes to its sudden apparent scarcity. In other words is this a problem in methodology? For instance, this list of male first names shows the following rankings among American male names: Fred, 71; Frederick, 131; Freddie, 299; Fredrick, 303; Freddy, 533; Frederic, 720; Fredric, 992. Add those all together and you get a pretty common first name. There appears to be no danger of my first name falling out of favor. It’s No. 2 on the above list. Even among popular names for babies in 2005, John ranks No. 18. If you add in all the variant spellings (Jon being the most common) and all the foreign versions (Sean, Ian, Jean, Johan, etc.), I’m sure it is No. 1 by a country mile. Like many people, I have always disliked my first name, in my case precisely because it is so very common. Coupled with a very common last name (Gordon ranks 143 on this list of surnames), it results in a name of notable unmemorability, right up there with John Doe. That’s why I have always used my middle name, in hopes of distinguishing myself from the vast herd of John Gordons that roam the American landscape. I am not the only one to adopt this ploy. A friend once presented me with the following list of people with a first name of John who used their middle name:
John Quincy Adams
John Jacob Astor
John James Audubon
John Wilkes Booth
John Sherman Cooper
John Singleton Copley
John Foster Dulles
John Kenneth Galbraith
John Nance Garner
John Marshall Harlan
John Paul Jones
John Maynard Keynes
John Stuart Mill
John Ringling North
John Crowe Ransom
John Philip Sousa
John Singer Sargent
John Cameron Swayze
John Scott Trotter
Then there are also John Wellington Wells, the title character in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Sorcerer, and John Beresford Tipton, the mysterious moneybags who wrote the checks in the 1950s television series The Millionaire. I was nearly named otherwise. My father (fighting in Europe) wanted me named after my great-great grandfather, whose name was Powhatan Gordon (his mother claimed descent from Pocahontas—the direct surviving evidence is thin, to put it mildly, but the indirect evidence is very good, so who knows?). My mother was inclined to agree, but my grandmother Steele had a fit at the idea and that was that. I was stuck with John. I have always wondered if I would have disliked having the extraordinarily uncommon name of Powhatan as much as I have disliked the all-too-common John. Since one gets only a single trip through this vale of tears, that question will never be answered.
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