Why Irving?
Sunday, November 23rd, 2025 07:52 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png){kind=small}
languagehat_feedLH fave Ben Yagoda has posted an expanded version of a piece he published last week in the Forward, and it provides a convincing answer to a frequently asked question. He starts with a joke his mother liked to tell, the one about the kid whose mother calls him “bubele” so constantly that when she asked him what he learned on his first day in school, he says “I learned my name was Irving.” He continues:
Years ago, I reviewed Margaret Drabble’s novel The Ice Age, which begins with an epigraph from a William Wordsworth poem, “London 1802”: “Milton, thou shouldst be living at this hour.” I opened the review by quoting the line and saying it was “not, as you might expect, the plaint of a Miami Beach widow.”
The humor in both cases, such as it was, rested on “Irving” and “Milton” being stereotypical American Jewish names. The stereotype is accurate. It is easy to think of examples (Irving Berlin, Irving “Swifty” Lazar; Milton Berle, Milton Friedman), and there’s also data to back it up. In a 2016 MIT study, researchers ingeniously culled data from Jewish U.S. soldiers in World War II (median birth date: 1917) and found that Irving was the single most common given name; Milton was 13th. Those scholars, and others, have briefly commented on the popularity of those two names and some others that made the top-thirty list for Jewish G.I.s: Sidney, Morris, Stanley, Murray, and Seymour.
But the comments have missed an important point about the phenomenon, which I call “My name is Irving” (MNII). It even slipped by the late Harvard sociologist Stanley (emphasis added) Lieberson, who wrote frequently and perceptively about the factors that go into parents’ naming decisions. In his 2000 book A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change, Lieberson mentioned his own first name, plus Irving and Seymour, and described them as attractive to Jewish parents because they were “names that [were]… popular with fellow Americans.”
That isn’t really true. As the MIT study says, MNII names “stand out as favored by the Jewish immigrants but not by the general population.” According to Social Security Records, Irving was the 106th most popular name for all boys born in 1917, Milton the 75th; Stanley did a bit better at number 34. The others listed above are similarly low in the general count, especially Murray (241) and Seymour (242).
Someone else who has written widely in the field, Warren Blatt, called “Irving, Morris, Sidney, Sheldon, etc. … Anglo-Saxon names that were popular 100 years ago.”
That moves the discussion in the right direction but is misleading, because the word “popular” implies that they were traditional first names. In fact, Irving, Milton, Sidney, Morris, Stanley, Murray, and Seymour are venerable upper-crust British surnames. Only two of them are even mentioned in The Oxford Dictionary of English Christian Names (1947), Sidney and Stanley; the book notes that the latter’s “use as a christian name is apparently a recent development, originally due to the popularity of the explorer Henry Stanley (1841-1904).” […]
The last-name-to-first-name trend—which I’m not aware of having previously been discussed—hit quickly. Among the ten most common boys’ names for native-born members of Yiddish-speaking American households (that is, kids) in the 1910 census, there’s only one of the MNII type (Morris, at number seven). The others, in order, are Samuel, Louis, Harry, Jacob, Abraham, Isadore, Max, Benjamin, and Joseph.
What caused MNII to hit so soon after that? It’s impossible to say for sure, but it was not trivial. As Lieberson and a coauthor once observed, looking at first-name choices offers “a rare opportunity to study tastes in an exceptionally rigorous way.” I imagine the trend originated with some culture-loving Jews, who had been in the new country for a decade or more, who may have read Paradise Lost or seen Sir Henry Irving or one of his many thespian relatives on the stage, and thought such a distinguished name would cast a shimmering reflection on their sons. (And remember that they had a hall pass to use range freely in their choices because of the custom of giving kids a Hebrew or Yiddish names as well). Peers agreed, and soon the trend was viral.
MNII dissipated as quickly as hit, in some ways a victim of its own success. That is, it’s not necessarily attractive to give your kid a stereotypical name. There aren’t handy charts for later Jewish names along the lines of the World War II survey, but Social Security data for the whole country shows the MNII names peaking in popularity in the late teens and early ‘20s, then cratering.
In the 1930s and ‘40s, there were a lot of Normans, Henrys, Daniels, Jerrys, Howards, and Philips; and the popular ‘50s Jewish boys’ listed by Warren Blatt names rings true for my mischpoche: Alan, Andrew, Barry, Bruce, Eric, Jay, Marc, Michael, Peter, Richard, Robert, Roger, Scott, Steven, and Stuart. After that it was, and has been, back to the future, what with the flood of Noahs, Seths, Joshes, Sams, Bens, Isaacs, Abes, Maxes, and Jakes.
Isn’t that interesting? Click through for links and more details (as well as updating footnotes, like one on “why Irving, in particular, might have been so popular”).
And speaking of given names, my wife and I watched Ken Burns’ splendid new PBS series on the American Revolution, and among the very large cast of characters was one Albigence Waldo (1750-1794), a surgeon and diarist who wrote about the winter encampment at Valley Forge. I looked up that striking name and discovered the Joseph Bucklin Society page on Waldo, which explains that his sister Abigail married David Bucklin, who served in the Revolutionary Army:
Waldo’s personal sacrifice and the goodness and effectiveness of his efforts for the soldiers (which included Bucklins at Valley Forge) resulted in David Bucklin naming a son “Albigence”.
In memory of the events of the Revolutionary War, the David Bucklin family line deliberately continued to carry the name of “Albigence” for eight generations (two hundred years!), either as a first name or a middle name of a Bucklin boy.
Aside from them, however, I can find no one with that very odd name; it seems like it must, like the adjective Albigensian, be derived from the French city of Albi, but why? All theories are welcome.
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