After WWII, everyone just kinda stopped naming their sons Adolf. But people continued naming their sons Osama after 9/11, kept naming their sons Josef after Stalin did his thing, etc. Why is it only that one name?
After WWII, everyone just kinda stopped naming their sons Adolf. But people continued naming their sons Osama after 9/11, kept naming their sons Josef after Stalin did his thing, etc. Why is it only that one name?
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Hitler was too
You don’t meet a lot of Judas’ these days.
Young dolph 🐬
I don’t know any Pontius either
Not a ton of Attillas about, either.
Kill 6 million people, and that’ll happen.
RemindMe! 1 week
It isn’t. It’s just one of the more recent ones.
More unanimously seen as bad I suppose. German hitler fans are very much outcasts. Stalins still seen fondly by many Russians. Maos still seen very fondly by many Chinese people.
It’s still a common name in Mexico. Adolfo.
Donald will be ruined in due time.
Around 2010 I met a family with teenage sons who had been named Osama and Jihad. They went by other names by then.
There are also a fair few little girls called Isis whose parents were taken quite by surprise.
Everyone knew Stalin as Stalin, not Joseph.
Osama is a really common name in the middle east and the negative association with the name will be a lot stronger in the US than elsewhere.
You don’t meet a lot of Vladimirs, Judases, Genghis, Lucifers these days.
Then again I don’t know anyone who has named their daughter Karen in the last twenty years either.
I’ve met several French people. None of them have been named Napoleon.
There is a Croatian singer, Dado Topić, whose first name is Adolf. He is born in 1954, in communist Yugoslavia. He got name to honor good friend of his father, a Jew named Adolf, who helped him a lot in early life
Well, Joseph is a biblical name, very honored by Christians
Not many Caligula’s or Nero’s. Jezebel isn’t popular, but I had a gf who called herself that. Aleister is another name that wreaks of evil.
When’s the last time you met a Ghengis?
You see a lot of Pol Pot’s around?
No one in Cambodia will name their child Sarlot Sar (name of pol pot). That dude is more evil than even Hitler of all people and that’s saying something
Vidkun Quisling got his last name in the dictionary, and I really don’t think any norwegians would name their kid Vidkun either, not that it was a particularly popular name in the first place.
On the lighter side, almost nobody in the last 40 years has been named Gilligan or Kermit, either
You might get a better answer on r/asklinguistics.
The name Adolf in itself is not a popular one; have it gain notoriety and people will tend to avoid it.
Take name Joseph instead – very popular and commonplace name in all corners of the world. Joseph Stalin will not have as much of an impact on how the name is perceived.
My father in law is named Adolf. He was born in Germany in 1938, and moved to Canada is the early 60s. He goes by Al, now.
The only Nero I knew was a software for burning CDs.
The Germans were truly ashamed of themselves after the war, most didn’t know about the camps, when they found out, there was a national sense of deep regret and shame – they vowed to never forget and to never let it happen again.
Osama Bin Laden is still seen as a hero and martyr to many in the Arab world.
Stalin is still celebrated in Russia
There are plenty of people named Adolfo in Spanish speaking countries.
Oh, I don’t know. Find a girl younger than 9 whose name is Alexa.
Damien? The Omen wiped it off the map.
Never met a Jezebel
Ebenezer has been ruined
No one calls Stalin “Josef” hell I forgot that was even his name
Or Lucifer
The subway guy ruined Jared.
I know a few Donald’s who are now going by their middle names lol.
Joseph is an unkillable name because it’s the name of Jesus’s earthly father, Saint Joseph, and just by their nature saints names won’t go out of style easily.
Osama also is still a name just not in the US, because the 9/11 attacks aren’t actually universally condemned outside of the US, and typically places that would be inclined to name their kids Osama overlap with places who may not consider 9/11 to have been a particularly bad thing.
Hitler hit upon an intersection of universally condemned and also an otherwise fairly uncommon name, which coalesced into the name dying, if his name had been something else, perhaps he was named Peter Hitler, he would most certainly not have ended the name Peter.
Yezid stopped existing too
Talking about names, kinda bum to see the name Isis ruined. It is actually such a simple but beautiful name.
When did you last meet another Genghis?
I know it’s not an English name, but Benito isn’t a name that’s seen as often, AFAIK.
Judas is something you’ll never see. Napoleon is simultaneously pretentious and too esoteric. Heinrich is too common and basic to be ruined by one loser. Joseph Stalin, while bad, is one rather large blot living in the shadow of his Bibical namesake, so that’s never going away.
Osama was already a common name, and he was the black sheep of an already well known and powerful family, so it’s like if one of Zuckerburg’s kids grew up to run an extremist Christian nationalist paramilitary group and orchestrated the complete annihilation of the Burj Khalifa.
What about Attila?
My son Arkelly would like a word.
Betcha you won’t see anyone named Kanye in the future
Even born after-war in Germany people were named Adolf.
That’s just the most famous and dramatic example, this is happening on a smaller scale all the time. If you look at a timeline of the popularity of the name Ellen you can spot when Ellen DeGeneres came out by the sudden vertical drop in the graph. In the last few years Karen has all but disappeared as a new baby name. I do believe Hitler is the only guy to have ruined a style of facial hair though.
Has anyone ever met a Genghis khan recently?
I tried suggesting Genghis as a name for my child. For some reason I got refused.
Ellen dropped in popularity twice in history – once when Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian, and once when Ellen Page came out as a lesbian.
Names absolutely do take a hit when people don’t like something a person does.
I think Lucifer is a badass name but, I haven’t met anyone named that ever.
Well I wouldn’t want to call a son Elon now
People in the UK have stopped calling their boys Nigel since the advent of the right wing ‘politician’ Nigel Farage.
No Biggus Dickus’es around either.
I think it would be very rare to meet an Osama in the USA who was born in the 2000s. WW2 was a world event and while I’m not downgrading what happened in 9/11, it does not resonate in the rest of the world the way that WW2 did – 9/11 devastated NYC, WW2 devastated the majority of Europe. Stalin’s acts are also quite limited to Russia and well, there was a much more famous ‘good’ Joseph that people name their children after (step father of Jesus). I don’t know of any ‘good’ and very famous Adolf’s in history or culture.
Well, Joseph has an example that is hard to beat
Not many Saddams in my neighborhood.
I guess because names like Joseph or Osama have religious context/meaning whereas Adolf doesn’t
I think Donald will be ruined now too
Soon, Donald and Elon might be extinct…
Not sure, but it sure trumps the rest of them.
not many Benito here
I don’t know. I’m thinking Donald is going to be a very unpopular name going forward.
It’s not the same degree of evil, the twin towers terrorist attack killed 5k people more or less, Hitler war decimated so many countries, tried to exterminate an entire religion, nearly 100M people died because of WW2 and Hitler was the main face of the Axis side.