talbotlucas.org: a word to the wise is sufficient

Today in Property, my professor recalled the names of four siblings involved in a claim of title by adverse possession against co-tenants in common: Daisy, Myrtle, Violet, and Dorcas. And he volunteered some of the names of his family members that were common in their day and now are rare or seem strange to our ears.

This came to his mind because we were reading a case that has taken the place in our case book of the one he mentioned (Shives v. Niewoehner, 191 N.W.2d 633), and because Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law professor and one of the forces behind The Volokh Conspiracy, had only yesterday posted an interesting tidbit about names. It reads:

FORGOTTEN NAMES: I knew I had read an excellent book about trends in baby names, but I couldn't remember the name of the book or the author until Ted Arrowsmith reminded me. It's Stanley Lieberson, A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change (Yale University Press, 2000). Lieberson is a sociologist at Harvard. If you're about to have a son, "Stanley" would be a great name if you want a retro sound but don't want to use one of the same retro names everyone else is using. Stanley has been in decline for nearly a century. It was the 36th most common boy's name in the 1910s, but by 2001 it had dropped to number 513.

Those familiar with the talbotlucas.org family will probably smile at Professor Volokh's choice of "Stanley" as a good retro hip name...