Wednesday, February 09, 2005

... make sure your character's names make sense for their age. When Lisa was in school, she was one of many Lisa's. It was an enormously popular name. If you have a character named Lisa, people will instinctively feel she's, um, Lisa's age. Likewise if you have characters named Harriet or Florrie, they're probably elderly Jewish ladies. Max is either an eighty-year-old guy, a very young boy, or (most likely) a dog. A cheerleader is most likely Brittany or Ashley, statistically (or so I read on the Net, so it must be true). If you're a 15th Century Italian guy, you're probably Giovanni, Antonio, Piero, Francesco, Iacopo, Bartolomeo, Niccolo. (If you're a 20th Century Brooklyn Italian guy, you're probably Joey, Tony, Frankie or Nicky. Bart and Peter seem to have gone out the window.)

So it's not just what the name means to you, or the clever allusion to Faust you're making, it's also the nuances your audience gets without even knowing it...

5:06 PM

2 Comments:

http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/

Social Security's lists of popular baby names. Scroll to bottom of page for top 1000 by decade.

It's come in handy for suggesting names for friends kids too.

By  Anonymous, at 6:06 PM  

http://www.boston.com/ae/tv/articles/2005/02/10/the_games_people_play_with_names/

Here's an article on names for TV characters.

By  Peter, at 2:30 AM  

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