THE NAME OF THE ROSAMOND: Interesting mailbag in response to my post about trends in girls’ names vs. boys’ names. Here are some samples:

“There’s a marketing-packaging aspect to many of the non-traditional names — the image of the sun-tanned popular pretty sexily dressed teenage girl needs a name like Alexis or Britney or Samantha to go with it. Girls in soft drink commercials aren’t named Mary.

“My wife and I compromised our Jewish and Catholic traditions by going strictly OT — Aaron, Leah, Sam, Hannah. I bet that other people compromise by going with madeup names — then you don’t have to workout with your spouse which relatives will be remembered in your children’s names.”

“Maybe boys are given more conservative names because they will keep the family last name. That is, people often call boys by their family names. This seems to be especially true when boys have common first names…like Michael. So it’s less of an issue to give a boy a common name.

“Girls, on the other hand, give up their last names and are generally known by their first names, so its important to have the first name be distinctive.”

And: “My daughters are named Mary Katherine and Sarah Elizabeth. They reflected friends’ and relatives’ names; they would not look ridiculous on letterheads or on the fantails of warships; and they included the names of the Tudor queens, in roughly the right order.

“Unfortunately, true to form, the elder got into a fight with the younger, and excommunicated her.”