Hillary and the Name Game

Perhaps the strangest political story in the news today was the announcement by Hillary Clinton's campaign team that Senator Clinton was not named after Sir Edmund Hillary, the first man to climb Mount Everest. The New York Times reports:

For more than a decade, one piece of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's informal biography has been that she was named for Sir Edmund Hillary, the conqueror of Mount Everest. The story was even recounted in Bill Clinton's autobiography.

But yesterday, Mrs. Clinton's campaign said she was not named for Sir Edmund after all."It was a sweet family story her mother shared to inspire greatness in her daughter, to great results I might add," said Jennifer Hanley, a spokeswoman for the campaign.

While all the fuss? Well, given that Ms. Clinton was born in 1947 and Sir Edmund made his historic climb in 1953, this is exactly the sort of anecdote that--were it not pre-emptively dealt with by Clinton herself--would have eventually been discovered and seized upon by Republicans eager to portray Clinton as some sort of serial fabricator.


This story couldn't be less important, but I bring it up because it got me thinking. The perennial question regarding Hillary Clinton is whether she is more loved or hated by the American people. TIME Magazine recently devoted its cover to this very question.

One way to try to answer it is by conducting a poll; that's what TIME tried to do. But the apocryphal Sir Edmund story hints at a potentially more interesting way of approaching the issue. There's really no bigger compliment you can pay someone than naming your child after him or her. And, conversely, all it takes is one bad association to sour you on a name you might otherwise have liked.

For instance, the names Jackie and Jacqueline soared in popularity in the 1960s, almost surely because of the popularity of Jacqueline Kennedy.

So how does Hillary measure up? Well, according to the Social Security Administration, Hillary was the 238th most popular girl's name in 1986 (the one-elled variation, "Hilary", was 272nd). The name reached its peak in 1992--when Hillary became First Lady--hitting 131st on the list. But since 1992, the name has been in a precipitous decline, dropping out of the top 1000 altogether by 2002. That's not a very good sign.

And it's actually worse than it appears at first glance. Hillary's emergence on the national scene in 1992 seems to have had a standardizing effect on the spelling of the name. Prior to 1992, Hillary and Hilary were just about equally common. Both consistently ranked within the top 300 girls' names. But by 1993, Hilary (with one "l") had dropped to 651st, and by 1994 it was completely gone from the top 1000 (and has never returned). In other words, almost everyone who chose the name post-1992 used the spelling with two ells.

Even with this standardizing effect, however, the popularity of the name "Hillary" has still plummeted dramatically. Perhaps that just a coincidence. I doubt it, though.