Individual names with fascinating stories or explanations.
On September 2, 2019 — “just as Hurricane Dorian set its sights on the Florida coast” — Kay Lisa McCloud and Anthony Davis of DeLand, Florida, welcomed their first child, a baby boy.
What did they name him? Tadashi Dorian Davis — middle name to commemorate the storm.
Source: Johnson, Lauren M. “There was a baby born during the hurricane so his parents named him Dorian.” CNN 4 Sept. 2019.
Image: Adapted from Hurricane Elena by NASA (public domain)
Sambo is a style of martial arts that originated in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. The name of the sport is an acronym for the Russian phrase samozashchita bez oruzhiya, which means “self-defense without weapons.”
In November of 2019, the World Sambo Championships were held in Cheongju, South Korea.
While the tournament was taking place, a baby boy was born to martial arts coach Lee Ki-hun, who runs an Aikido and Sambo training center in Cheongju.
What did Lee decide to name his son? Sambo.
Sources:
Image: Adapted from Sambo at the 2015 European Games by the Presidential Press and Information Office of Azerbaijan under CC BY 4.0.
[Latest update: Mar. 2025]
In the late 1950s, the name Ryne debuted impressively in the U.S. baby name data:
Where did it come from?
It was inspired by professional baseball pitcher Rinold “Ryne” Duren, known for “[staring] down batters through thick-lensed eyeglasses and then [delivering] fastballs that might go just about anywhere.”
In fact, Duren was the inspiration for the character Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaughn (played by Charlie Sheen) in the 1989 movie Major League.
Duren was in the Major Leagues from 1954 to 1965, but in 1958 was a member of the World Series-winning New York Yankees. It was also the first year he was selected for the All-Star Game.
He inherited the name Rinold from his father, whose family came from Germany. Rinold, like Renault, is related to the more familiar name Reynold.
But that’s not the end of the story!
Because one of the 1959 babies named Ryne was Ryne Dee “Ryno” Sandberg, who also became a professional baseball player (second baseman).
Sandberg made his major-league debut in 1981, but his breakout season wasn’t until 1984. That year, he was named the National League’s Most Valuable Player and appeared in his first All-Star game. The future Hall of Famer went on to become a ten-time All-Star and a nine-time Gold Glove winner.
He boosted the name Ryne not just back into the data, but into the top 1,000 for the first time:
Do you like the name Ryne? Would you use it for a baby boy?
P.S. Ryne Sandberg had a son in the mid-1980s, but didn’t give him a baseball-inspired name. Instead, Justin Ross got a theater-inspired name. Ryne had seen “A Chorus Line” in New York around that time and been impressed with the name of performer Justin Ross.
Sources:
Top two images: Ryne Duren and Ryne Sandberg trading cards
Here’s an interesting name-evolution story.
Mary “Polly” Phelps Jacob was born in 1891 in New York to a blue-blooded family that could be traced back, on both sides, to colonial America.
She was an enterprising person, and in her early 20s — fed up with the corset-like undergarments of the era — she invented and patented a “backless brassiere.” (She constructed the first one out of handkerchiefs and pink ribbon.) Today, she’s credited with the invention the modern bra.
With her first marriage in 1915 to Richard Peabody, her name changed to the almost cartoonish Polly Peabody. (One of their two kids, legally named Polleen, also went by Polly.)
But that marriage didn’t last and, following the divorce in 1922, Polly married bon vivant Harry Crosby, with whom she’d been having an open affair. At first she went by Polly Crosby, but Harry declared that Polly needed a better name:
Clytoris, an early suggestion, was sensibly saved for the family’s second whippet (the first was named Narcisse Noir). They told Caresse’s daughter Polleen that she was named after a Greek goddess.
After deciding upon “Caresse,” the wealthy couple moved to Paris and “lived a theatrically mad, bad and Bohemian existence.” With the help of their small publishing house, Black Sun Press, they became close to many Lost Generation artists and writers, including Ernest Hemingway.
Harry committed suicide two months after the stock market crash of 1929 (which kicked off the Great Depression). Caresse’s life post-Harry was slightly less colorful, and she used name “Mary Caresse Crosby” slightly more often, but was still primarily known as Caresse.
Sources: Polly Peabody, The Bohemian Blueblood Who Invented the Bra, Mary Phelps Jacob (Caresse Crosby), The Crosbys: literature’s most scandalous couple
P.S. Did you know that the name Caresse started appearing in the U.S. baby name data back in 1949?
P.P.S. Just discovered (June 2020) that Drunk History has a Mary Phelps Jacob episode.
