A name for the ages
Ditch the Botox: No matter how young you look, your name reveals your age as surely as an obsessive eBay search for Tigress by Fabergé. If you’re a Susan or a Donna, you’re over 40; a Betty or a Ruth, over 60. And if you go by Dakota or Jayden, put down this magazine immediately, young lady: You haven’t seen your 25th birthday!
If names can capture a zeitgeist, Debbie expresses the spirit of the 1950s and early ’60s, personified by the all-singing, all-dancing Debbie Reynolds. Check the statistics for baby names and you’ll see the popularity of Debbie rising with the perky Ms. Reynolds’ stardom. Moms-to-be munched popcorn while she tapped her way through Singin’ in the Rain. And she was so darn cute being wooed by Leslie Nielsen in Tammy and the Bachelor, who wouldn’t want their little girl to be just like her? Debra, Deborah, Debbie and Debby bubbled into the North America’s top 10 baby names and stayed there throughout the prime baby boom years.
Thanks to their mothers’ estrogen-fuelled fantasies of their daughters lounging poolside with Rock Hudson, so many crimpolene-covered Debbies crowded into my grad photo that I can barely remember which was which. They were simply “the Debbies.” As little girls, they took every kind of lesson: tap, voice, baton twirling, you name it. In high school, they were the fun girls everyone wanted at their slumber parties. The ones you could count on to show up with hash brownies and dog-eared copies of Playgirl pilfered from the back of Mac’s Milk. Who needed Facebook when you had a Debbie willing to make prank calls at 3 a.m. to the hunky guys in industrial arts class?
Given the size of the Debbie demographic, there should be thousands of boomer Debbies out there. Boardrooms should be stuffed with them. The House of Commons should have a special “D” block for the Honourable Debbies. So why is it that I never meet any of them?
A call to all renouced Debbies
The answer: naked ambition. The Debbies outgrew their name. Like their “ee!” sisters — Tammy, Cindi, Patti, Suzi and (ahem) Terri — Debbie hints at a lifetime of dotting i’s with hearts and being incapable of balancing a chequebook. A great name for a Hooters hostess; not so great for, say, a neurosurgeon or financial planner. So when Debbie grew up, she discreetly turned into a respectable (and boring) Deborah, a biblical name that inspires trust and promises no surprises.
Sadly, there are few young Debbies. The name has become as rare as a Gen Y Jessica without an ankle tattoo. Vital statistics for British Columbia, for example, show that while the province welcomed an Emma 246 times in 2006, not a single B.C. girl was called Debbie that year. We’ll probably have to wait for the Debbies’ granddaughters to be born before the name pliés its way back into popularity.
As for the Debbie of today, my money is on Madison, currently among the top 10 baby names in every part of the country except Quebec. Madison became a popular name only when a mermaid in the movie Splash adopted it. That’s right: Thousands of girls are being named after a fish.
God, how I miss the Debbies! If you’re one of them, I urge you to rediscover your frivolous side. See what the industrial arts guys are up to. Tell your mom you’ve gone back to tap dancing. She’ll be delighted all those lessons weren’t a waste of money.
And, most of all, throw some parties. This time, the brownies are on me.
This article originally appeared in the Summer 2008 issue of More
