Some tidbits about Russian names

While studying Russian today, in the New Penguin Russian course, I found one of the EXTRA sections to be really interesting. From page 63:

Russians are conservative when naming children, keeping to a relatively small number of old, safe names such as Елена, Николай, Владимир, Наталья. You will probably find that all the Russian men you meet share about a dozen names, while the women have about two dozen. There was a fashion in the thirties for more ‘international’ names such as Роберт, Эдурд, and immediately after the revolution for new, revolutionary names, but now people prefer to play safe. In the case of boys, parents always bear in mind that an ‘unfortunate’ choice of name (Спутник, ‘Sputnik’, Трактор ‘Tractor’), which seemed all right at the time, will be inflicted on the grandchildren too through the patronymic.

The emphases are mine.

I was initially surprised to read that most males share roughly a dozen recycled names, but after thinking about it some more, my surprise has lessened somewhat. In America, there are certainly a lot more than a dozen typical names for males, but some names are used a lot more often than others. In one of my high school classes, there were 5 males named Josh, myself included.

I chuckled a bit when I saw the names Спутник and Трактор. I’m not sure if the author meant that he had stumbled into those names specifically, or just names that are similarly silly-sounding. Either way, reading about those two names reminded me of a story that my mom told me. She went to school with a pair of twins, one male and one female. Their last name was Ball. Her parents had decided to name the girl Crystal, and the boy Cannon.

Why would you do that to your children? “Hi, I’m Cannon Ball. This is my sister Crystal Ball.”

Wow.