Free Kentucky Derby party for Bostonians named Jeremy

Kentucky Derby, 2017

Is your name Jeremy? Do you live in (or near) Boston?

If so, you can attend a Kentucky Derby party for free tomorrow afternoon.

The Sporting Club — a bar located at Omni Boston Hotel at the Seaport — is hosting its 3rd annual Kentucky Derby party from 3 to 7 p.m. on Saturday, May 4.

This year, to honor the racehorse “Lucky Jeremy,” who has a 500-1 odds of winning the top prize in U.S. horse racing, any person with the name Jeremy can enter free of charge and be treated like a VIP with complimentary food, The Sporting Club said.

People who are not named Jeremy can buy tickets online (while they’re still available) for $25.

Source: McLaughlin, Chris. “Is your name Jeremy? Kentucky Derby promo at Boston bar allows ‘VIP’ entry.” MassLive.com 25 Apr. 2024.

Image: Adapted from 2017 Kentucky Derby by squirrel83 under CC BY 2.0.

Directory updated

The new look of the baby name directory

Hi everyone! Just wanted to let you know that the baby name directory has been updated and redesigned. The directory now covers the full SSA dataset (1880-2022), and the pages should both load more quickly and be easier to use on a phone.

Here are the girl names that start with N, for instance, and the girl names with 5 letters. To see other lists, try one of these links:

I hope you like the improvements. I’m sorry the directory pages were so sluggish for so long.

Timeline updated

Hi everyone! Two quick announcements regarding the baby name timeline.

First, I’ve added 2022, finally. :)

Second, I’ve started sprucing up the timeline. I’m putting each year on its own page and throwing in some fun sets of rankings:

  • Top 5 popular names overall (male & female)
  • Top 5 absolute increases (male & female)
  • Top 5 relative increases (male & female)
  • Top 5 debuts (male & female)

Only handful of years (1926, 1927, 1984, 1985, and 2021) have been converted so far, and converting the rest will take me a number of months. In the meantime, if you’re curious to see the rankings for a particular year (or years), please let me know below and I’ll work on those first.

Named Linda? Join the club.

chairs

A few months ago, while revamping a post about the fastest-rising girl names of all time, I came across the L.I.N.D.A. Club — a club exclusively for people named Linda.

The only requirement for membership, according to the club’s website, is that one’s first name be Linda or a spelling variant thereof (such as Lynda, Linnda, or Lynnda).

Nearly every year since 1987, the Lindas have held a convention — including one this past weekend in Niagara Falls, New York.

They cleverly held their 2015 event in Linda, California.

And they invited Jack Lawrence — the man behind the hit song that popularized their shared first name back in the 1940s — to attend the 1989 event in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. He said:

[A] group of ladies in the middle west contacted me to explain that they had started an organization called LINDA and were holding annual meetings with many other ladies who had been named Linda as a result of my song. I went as their guest to their third annual meeting […] and it was a most peculiar feeling to address each and every one as LINDA. […] I don’t know of any other songs that have sparked such yearly meetings.

Two other name-clubs I’ve blogged about are the Shirley Club and the Lois Club. Do you know of any others?

Source: Linda – Jack Lawrence, Songwriter

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