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ArchivesRe: Mason
in reply to a message by Toni81983
Pop culture influences on names are often part of a back-and-forth "feedback loop" pattern.
Mason was already quite common before Kourtney Kardashian gave that name to her child. However, the name had plateaued before her son was born in December of 2009.
The % of newborn boys in the USA named Mason is as follows:
2006: 0.4752
2007: 0.4864
2008: 0.4812
2009: 0.5045
2010: 0.7234
2011: 0.9625
2012: 0.9383
So Mason rose 2.4% between 2006 and 2007 and actually dropped by 1.1% between 2007 and 2008.
Kourtney Kardashian's Mason was born in December 2009. Between 2008 and 2009 the name rises 4.8%; a birth that late in the year wouldn't have had a huge impact on yearly totals.
But then between 2009 and 2010 the name goes up 44%, a really big rise for a name whose popularity had seemed to have already peaked. It goes up another 33% between 2010 and 2011, and then falls by 2.5 % between 2011 and 2012.
This looks to me like the sort of "goosing" of a name that comes from a particular celebrity news event. So although Kourtney Kardashian did not start off the fashion for Mason, I think there's a good chance the name would never have gotten as high as #2 without her influence.
(From quick Googling it seems unlikely to me that "Twilight" was a big influence because the character there seems to be a "Mr. Mason" who's a high school teacher, not one of the main characters. And though it's possible for a celebrity surname to be taken up as a given name, that usually isn't as large an impact as when it's the character's first name.)
Mason was already quite common before Kourtney Kardashian gave that name to her child. However, the name had plateaued before her son was born in December of 2009.
The % of newborn boys in the USA named Mason is as follows:
2006: 0.4752
2007: 0.4864
2008: 0.4812
2009: 0.5045
2010: 0.7234
2011: 0.9625
2012: 0.9383
So Mason rose 2.4% between 2006 and 2007 and actually dropped by 1.1% between 2007 and 2008.
Kourtney Kardashian's Mason was born in December 2009. Between 2008 and 2009 the name rises 4.8%; a birth that late in the year wouldn't have had a huge impact on yearly totals.
But then between 2009 and 2010 the name goes up 44%, a really big rise for a name whose popularity had seemed to have already peaked. It goes up another 33% between 2010 and 2011, and then falls by 2.5 % between 2011 and 2012.
This looks to me like the sort of "goosing" of a name that comes from a particular celebrity news event. So although Kourtney Kardashian did not start off the fashion for Mason, I think there's a good chance the name would never have gotten as high as #2 without her influence.
(From quick Googling it seems unlikely to me that "Twilight" was a big influence because the character there seems to be a "Mr. Mason" who's a high school teacher, not one of the main characters. And though it's possible for a celebrity surname to be taken up as a given name, that usually isn't as large an impact as when it's the character's first name.)
This message was edited 10/6/2013, 12:57 PM
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