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Re: The 5 Worst Rated Names
Just to point out again that for someone my age or older the slang meaning of Dick just would not be the first thing that would spring to mind when one hears or sees the name, precisely because one did know so many men called Dick. It would be the name that would come to mind first. It's only when Richard went out of style and Rich and Rick became the more common pet forms of it that younger people started immediately thinking of the slang meaning when they heard the word and so began to see it as inappropriate as a name. (And the slang meaning only goes back to around 1895 and I really think a lot of AMericans, especially middle class women, wouldn't have known it at all until the 1950s.)John has not one but two "bad" slang meanings in the USA -- toilet and prostitute's customer -- but it has never become uncommon enough for people not to know several men or boys called John (or Jon), so one's mind doesn't immediately go to the unforunate meanings when one hears the word and people don't think of it as an inappropriate name.
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