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Named Betty? Join the club.

chairs

In 1994, Betty Krueger of Red Cloud, Nebraska, took out a personal ad in the Hastings Tribune. It began:

BETTY — To anyone named Betty or who goes by the name of Betty, would you like to meet other Bettys? How many of us are there?

Twelve Bettys (including Krueger) attended the first meeting of the Betty Club, which continues to meet several times per year to this day.

The original Betty Club inspired Bettys across the state to create more than a dozen other Betty Clubs in the mid-1990s. Not long after that, Nebraska’s annual Betty Convention was established.

The second convention, held in 1998, was attended by 64 Bettys and covered by the New York Times, which noted that “Betty clubs exist in other states, but Nebraska is said to be especially rich in Bettys.”

Sources:

Image: Adapted from Chaises-saint-denis (public domain) by Thierry Caro

What gave the baby name Mercedes a boost in 1989?

The character Mercedes Lane from the movie "License to Drive" (1988)
Mercedes Lane from “License to Drive“

The name Mercedes, which has featured in the U.S. baby name data since the very beginning, saw a steep rise in usage during the late 1980s and early 1990s:

  • 1992: 1,729 baby girls named Mercedes [rank: 178th]
  • 1991: 1,798 baby girls named Mercedes [rank: 164th]
  • 1990: 1,654 baby girls named Mercedes [rank: 176th]
  • 1989: 1,219 baby girls named Mercedes [rank: 224th]
  • 1988: 609 baby girls named Mercedes [rank: 395th]
  • 1987: 427 baby girls named Mercedes [rank: 501st]
  • 1986: 385 baby girls named Mercedes [rank: 530th]

What triggered the increase?

I think the answer is a combination of two different things.

The initial influence was the Pebbles song “Mercedes Boy” [vid], in which the singer repeatedly asks, “Do you wanna ride in my Mercedes, boy?” The song was released as a single in March of 1988 and ranked #2 on Billboard‘s Hot 100 chart for two weeks in July.

Pebbles' single "Mercedes Boy" (1988)
Pebbles single

The second influence was a character from the teen comedy License to Drive, which came out in theaters in July of 1988. Mercedes Lane (played by Heather Graham) was the crush of main character Les Anderson (played by Corey Haim) — who wasn’t going to let the fact that he’d failed his driver’s exam stop him from taking Mercedes out on a date in his grandfather’s prized Cadillac.

The License to Drive soundtrack didn’t include “Mercedes Boy,” but viewers could hear more than a minute of the song during a scene in which Les was out driving with his father.

The name Mercedes means “mercies” in Spanish. It comes from Nuestra Señora de las Mercedes, one of the many titles of the Virgin Mary.

The name came to be associated with cars in the first years of the 1900s. Austrian businessman Emil Jellinek ordered a racing car (built to his specifications) from German manufacturer Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft in 1900, and he dubbed the car “Mercedes” in honor of his daughter Mercédès (b. 1889). The car became so successful that, in 1902, DMG began using “Mercedes” as the official trade name of its entire line of cars.

What are your thoughts on the name Mercedes?

Sources: Mercedes Boy – Wikipedia, Billboard Hot 100 for the week of 9 Jul. 1988, License to Drive – Wikipedia, Emil Jellinek – Wikipedia, SSA

Top image: Screenshot of License to Drive

Popular baby names in Turkey, 2024

Flag of Turkey
Flag of Turkey

Last year, the country of Turkey (located largely in Asia) welcomed 937,369 babies.

What were the most popular names among these babies? Defne and Alparslan.

Turkey’s official rankings included just 30 names per gender this time around, so here are the top 30 girl names and top 30 boy names of 2024:

Girl names

  1. Defne, 7,466 baby girls
  2. Asel, 7,347
  3. Zeynep, 6,540
  4. Asya, 5,041
  5. Gökçe, 4,759
  6. Zümra, 4,685
  7. Elif, 4,203
  8. Elisa, 4,197
  9. Lina, 3,655
  10. Duru, 3,389
  11. Umay, 3,348
  12. Mihra, 3,271
  13. Inci, 3,179
  14. Efnan, 3,151
  15. Miray, 3,069
  16. Alya, 2,883
  17. Doga, 2,800
  18. Meryem, 2,722
  19. Nehir, 2,651
  20. Eylül, 2,636
  21. Ebrar, 2,610 (tie)
  22. Ecrin, 2,610 (tie)
  23. Masal, 2,606
  24. Günes, 2,521
  25. Azra, 2,505
  26. Eslem, 2,463
  27. Ela, 2,422
  28. Ikra, 2,404
  29. Ada, 2,360
  30. Aden, 2,236

Boy names

  1. Alparslan, 8,088 baby boys
  2. Göktug, 5,683
  3. Yusuf, 4,880
  4. Metehan, 4,762
  5. Ömer Asaf, 4,244
  6. Kerem, 4,207
  7. Aslan, 3,920
  8. Ömer, 3,869
  9. Miraç, 3,743
  10. Eymen, 3,676
  11. Aras, 3,562
  12. Miran, 3,356
  13. Atlas, 3,345
  14. Poyraz, 3,073
  15. Muhammed, 2,929
  16. Ali Asaf, 2,913
  17. Mustafa, 2,907
  18. Alperen, 2,834
  19. Ayaz, 2,693
  20. Muhammed Ali, 2,640
  21. Ali, 2,625
  22. Ahmet, 2,585
  23. Kuzey, 2,578
  24. Yigit, 2,463
  25. Aybars, 2,457
  26. Hamza, 2,446
  27. Mehmet, 2,406
  28. Çinar, 2,377
  29. Mert, 2,138
  30. Emir, 2,076

The last time I posted rankings for Turkey, in 2022, the top girl name was Zeynep.

P.S. The Turkish letters G-with-a-breve, S-with-a-cedilla, dotted-I, and dotless-i don’t render properly on my site, so please imagine they exist in several of the above: the girl names Inci, Doga, Günes, and Ikra, and the boy names Göktug, Yigit, and Çinar.

Sources:

Image: Adapted from Flag of Turkey (public domain)

Timeline progress #2

Hi everyone! Here’s another quick update regarding the baby name timeline, which I’ve been revamping since late 2023.

As of right now, more than 70% of the years on the timeline have been transferred to individual pages featuring several sets of rankings:

  • The top 5 names overall (male & female),
  • The top 5 absolute increases in usage (male & female),
  • The top 5 relative increases in usage (male & female), and
  • The top 5 debuts (male & female).

In the last progress post, I mentioned that three decades had been fully converted. Since then, I’ve finished another five: the 1900s, the 1910s, the 1920s, the 1960s, and the 1990s.

Hopefully it’ll all be done sometime next year!