Neveah Must Be Missing Some Angles

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City Room has posted a chart showing the most popular baby names in New York City in 2007. Most of the popular names have the whiff of daytime dramas (Madison? Justin?), even among those from non-European backgrounds. The No. 1 name for Asian boys? Ryan. For Hispanic girls? Ashley. But, I wondered, what happens when you dig deeper into the health department's full list [pdf]? You find boys with somewhat unusual names for this day and age, like Achilles, Shemar, Shiloh, Orion; and small clusters of baby girls with names like Dakota, Essence, Heaven, Serenity, Shiloh again, Treasure, Precious and Princess.

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About the Name @Palafo

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When I started working on the metropolitan desk of The New York Times in 1997, the newsroom was using a publishing system known as Atex for text editing. Usernames were six characters long. The naming convention at the time was to take the first two letters of the staffer's given name and the first four letters of the surname. Patrick+LaForge=Palafo.

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