Last week, Blogging Baby reported on a remarkable bit of data analysis on Urban Baby, which broke down the citywide Health Department data to reveal the most popular names by neighborhood.
Wow, how'd they do that, I wondered? I couldn't remember the NYC data having that level of granularity. So I checked, and sure enough, it doesn't, and sure enough, Urban Baby didn't.
Turns out the list is actually just "fashionable names we at newyork.urbanbaby have heard around your neighborhood." And the list below it is at least two Seinfelds kids and one Sarah Jessica Parker kid out of date, which dates it to, what, 2000? And I don't need actual data [either, heh] to tell me that UB itself can take credit for 90% of any recent surge in alternate [sic] spellings of "Gwenyth" and "Sebastin" in town.
Or at least the ones in Manhattan. Because when they say "around your neighborhood," they, of course, only mean "Upper East Side," "Upper West Side," and "Downtown." Which you think would make the folks in Brooklyn mad--except they're too busy arguing over the perpetuation of useless, hurtful, outdated gender distinctions to notice.
NYC Baby Names [urbanbaby via bloggingbaby]
Tot's Hat Triggers Slope Spat [nymag via gawker]
PS And judging from the email exchange, the most popular boys girls children's names in Park Slope are: Jake, Aniella, Ina, Andres, Lily, Annabelle, Max, Leo, Sasha, Tara, Bobby, Lulu, Bryce, Timothy, Chloe, Isaac, Ethan, and Ruby.
PPS And except for a Dan, a Ben, and one Kim [who knows??], it's all moms duking it out.
And there's a rise of kids named Andri in the Slope.
Just how old are the "NYC Baby Names" lists?
The footer on that page says "Copyright (c) 1999-2004".. Might be outdated.