My Baby Boomer Name Might Have Been “Debbie”

By Julia Silge

I have always loved learning and thinking about names, how they are chosen and used, and how people feel about their names and the names around them. We had a traditional baby name book at our house when I was growing up (you know, lists of names with meanings), and I remember poring over it to find unusual or appealing names for my pretend play or the stories I wrote. As an adult, I read Laura Wattenberg’s excellent book on baby names when we were expecting our second baby, and I also discovered the NameVoyager on Wattenberg’s website. I just love that kind of thing.

The data used to make the NameVoyager interactive is from the Social Security Administration based on Social Security card applications, and Hadley Wickham has done the work of taking the same data and making it an R package. Lucky us! Let’s use this package and take a look at how the popularity of my name has changed over time.

library(babynames)
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
data(babynames)
juliejulia  babynames %>% filter(sex == "F", name %in% c("Julia", "Julie"))
ggplot(juliejulia, aes(x = year, y = prop, color = name)) + 
        geom_line(size = 1.1) + 
        theme(legend.title=element_blank()) + 
        scale_color_manual(values = c("tomato", "midnightblue")) + 
        ggtitle("My Name Is NOT JULIE!") +
        ylab("Proportion of total applicants for year") + xlab("Year")

The babynames package includes data from 1880 through 2014. I was born in 1978; notice that for about 20 years or so before my birth, the name “Julie” was very popular, about 4 times as popular as “Julia”. This means that by the time I was born, there were many more girls …read more

Source:: r-bloggers.com