I DIDN’T KNOW THIS: Longtime readers may recall my posts on naming trends for boys vs. girls. Father Neuhaus of First Things (in)fame is also interested in this stuff, and he writes, “I don’t know how interested you are in onomastics. (For those who aren’t interested at all, onomastics is the study of names and their origins.) But, in response to my annual report on how boys and girls are being named, Father Paul Mankowski, who teaches in Rome and is interested in and knowledgeable about at least a dozen fields I’ve never heard of, had this to say: “On names for children. You write that ‘girls get the glitzy and frivolous names while boys are named more seriously, usually for biblical figures.’ There is a sense in which this reflects the biblical tradition itself. Almost without exception, male Israelites had names which express some theological content: ‘My God is Justice,’ ‘YHWH is Lord,’ etc. And more often than not, Israelite women were named for spices, jewels, and cute animals: ‘heifer’ (Leah), ‘ewe’ (Rachel), ‘honeybee’ (Deborah = Melissa in Greek), ‘gazelle’ (Tabitha)—or they had names of endearment: ‘my sweetness’ (Naomi), ‘my delight is in her’ (Hepzibah), ‘princess’ (Sarah). There’s a sense in which it would seem that different emotions and purposes are to the fore in naming baby boys and baby girls, though after the first century it seems both Christians and Jews began to name babies of both sexes after biblical or religious figures.’ So I suppose that, at least with respect to the names of girls, we may be witnessing a return to biblical, or at least Old Testament, practice.”