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HelpRe: Ashley & young Americans
in reply to a message by Isla
If you check Emma's profile, you will see that she just barely turned 18. And since she has never heard of Ashley on a boy, she probably lives in the USA (just maybe possibly Canada).
Ashley has been more common for girls than boys in the USA at least since 1964. It was fantastically popular during the 1980s and 1990s. The SSA list has it as the #1 girls' name in the USA during 1991 and 1992, and if alternative spellings were added in its reign as #1 would be much longer than that. Already 20 years ago when I first came to Nebraska, a lot of my then-18-year-old freshperson college students here couldn't conceive of there being such a thing as a boy named Ashley. It may be amazing to old movie buffs and fans of Southern USA history, but today the majority of young Americans have never seen the film Gone With the Wind or read the book, and so don't know that Ashley Wilkes was a chief male character in that story. The only Ashleys therefore that many of them have heard of are all the young women they personally know with that name. And most young people always tend to be shocked when they first find out that a name that they have only known as being commonly used for one gender was actually originally used for the opposite one. :)
Ashley has been more common for girls than boys in the USA at least since 1964. It was fantastically popular during the 1980s and 1990s. The SSA list has it as the #1 girls' name in the USA during 1991 and 1992, and if alternative spellings were added in its reign as #1 would be much longer than that. Already 20 years ago when I first came to Nebraska, a lot of my then-18-year-old freshperson college students here couldn't conceive of there being such a thing as a boy named Ashley. It may be amazing to old movie buffs and fans of Southern USA history, but today the majority of young Americans have never seen the film Gone With the Wind or read the book, and so don't know that Ashley Wilkes was a chief male character in that story. The only Ashleys therefore that many of them have heard of are all the young women they personally know with that name. And most young people always tend to be shocked when they first find out that a name that they have only known as being commonly used for one gender was actually originally used for the opposite one. :)
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