I enjoy following baby naming trends, and I'd like to chat about that if you don't mind. What names were most commonly heard when you were growing up?

I was in school through the 1970's and graduated in the early 1980's.

Trends in boys' names don't change as fast as they do on the girls' side. Among my classmates, boys had traditional, timeless names like John, Michael, David, William, James, Richard, Edward, and Robert. Names that wouldn't have been too far out of place on our fathers' birth certificates either. Or they had surfer beach boy names such as Brian, Jeffrey, Brad, Greg, Todd, Scott, Christopher, and Dean. Which might have sounded a little strange applied to a 40-year-old at that time.

Raymond, Arthur, George, Henry, Lloyd, Walter, names ending in -ard other than Richard and Edward (Howard, Leonard, Willard) and Ed- names other than Edward (Edwin, Edmond) weren't unheard of, but they were more likely to belong to our fathers and uncles than to our classmates and brothers. Unless they were a Junior, of course, and a lot of boys were. Charles kind of rode the fence. He could be old or young, but if he was old, he was known as Charlie, and if young, Chuck.

Boys' middle names were most often Allen/Alan, Lee, and Wayne. In fact, if I had a classmate whose name was John, there was a good chance his middle name was Wayne. Our parents used to worship that guy. I don't know why. But if one of us had a father or uncle named John, chances were greater that his middle name would be Henry. Same hero-worship kind of thinking.

Baby boys of the day were being named Joshua, Jesse, Jason, Jeremy, and Justin. J-names were all the rage.

Girls were usually Jennifer, Debbie, Lisa, Angela, Kimberly, Melissa, Stephanie, Tammy, and Cindy. Debbie, Tammy, and Cindy, by the way, could be formally named Deborah, Tamara, and Cynthia, or they could be just plain Debbie, Tammy, and Cindy. There were still a few girls my age named Brenda, Karen, Susan, Linda, Barbara, and Donna, but those names were fading and mostly belonged to our mothers and aunts. Carol, Alice, Doris, Shirley, and Nancy, forget it. Those were names for mothers, aunts, and maybe even grandmothers, not young schoolgirls. Names like Tonya, Michelle, and Stacy belonged to our little sisters in elementary school.

Pretty much every girl’s middle name was Ann, Lynn, or Marie. If not one of those, then Kay, Sue, Jean, or Gail. Rose, Jane, and Nicole as middle names wouldn't catch on for another few years. Those were more likely going to be our daughters' middle names.

Baby girls were being named Rebecca, Heather, Crystal, Amber, and Amanda. Hardly anybody had ever heard of a girl named Tiffany, Chelsea, or Michaela, in whatever spelling. The likes of Jessica, Ashley, Brittany, Megan, Courtney, and Taylor weren't quite taking off yet, but when they did, oh boy, did they ever.

What was the naming landscape like for you?