My middle child once had a pleasantly semi-rare name, Greta, a variation on my grandmother’s name, Gretchen. No more. It isn’t that my daughter has changed her name, but that the rarity of the name is about to change, thanks to the instant celebrity of teenage climate warrior Greta Thunberg. Who knows whether her global warming Cassandra bit or President Trump insulting her has done more to cement her heroine status — either, by itself, would have been enough to get her in the running for Time’s Person of the Year; both, and it was a lock. What’s certain now is that Thunberg’s celebrity will produce a generation of women named Greta, for better or worse.
When my wife was pregnant with our second child, we went through all the typical back and forth over prospective names. We didn’t know whether we were having a girl or a boy, so we had to try out names for both. I wasn’t joking when I pitched “Jackson Thomas” as a boy’s name, as it would have allowed me to call the little guy “Jackson T.,” the nickname of the great swing-era trombonist Jack Teagarden. I was kidding, however, when I suggested we consider some obscure Old Testament monikers. Lemuel, perhaps? Or how about Uriah? Uriah hasn’t been fashionable for a while. Yes, why not Uriah?
Why not, indeed. Uriah had once been a perfectly solid biblical name. And then, Charles Dickens had to come along with The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery. The serial novel featured a cretinous, clammy-handed toady named Uriah Heep, sycophantic enough to make Eddie Haskell seem like the soul of sincerity.
Just imagine the misery of the poor Victorian men named Uriah who had to wait each month for a new installment of Dickens’s novel to find out what new awfulness would contribute to making the name Uriah a pariah. The last we see of Uriah is when he is being denounced, by a sputtering Mr. Micawber, as a “Heep of infamy.”
Such is the trouble with names. We’re stuck with them, and a lot can happen to change their connotations over the course of a lifetime. When I was growing up, I lived across the street from a kind older man named Otto. (An inveterate tinkerer, he once made me a sort of skateboard out of a scrap of lumber and his grown daughter’s old roller skates.) It wasn’t until many years later that I learned “Otto” was not his given name. His parents had called him “Adolf,” which at the time was a perfectly respectable choice, but which came to far outdo Uriah in infamy.
My daughter’s name, by contrast, has gained cachet. Greta may not supplant Emma at the top of the annual baby name rankings; it may not even knock off Ava or Amelia. But my guess is that in 2020, Charlotte, already on the wane, will have fallen from its place at the bottom of the top 10; Greta will climb to somewhere in the middle of the list.
Greta (my daughter, not the Time laureate) isn’t bothered at all that her name will now be commonplace, especially given the timing. Names are generational. Being named Brittany/Britni/Brittennee is a dead giveaway that a young woman is a millennial. There will come a time when all the Brittanies will be in their 60s, and that name will be a signal (just as Doris was some time ago) that retirement age looms. My Greta will be 20 years older than all the new Gretas. Which means that a few decades from now, Greta will be assumed, because of her name, to be younger than she is.
I wish I were named Greta.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
