There was a time when girls, ahead of the women's empowerment movement, wanted their first names to be short and sparing of excess syllables. Witness Yvonne who changed to Sue,Sarah Wayne who morphed to Laurie, Iva Jane who went by Tink, and all the carefully chosen middle names that were never used. Mothers used to pore through Baby Books to find just the right combination of names, and the girls seldom acknowledged they even had a middle name. To make the burden of a carefully chosen accompaniment to a first name that would be relatively painless later on , the main choices dwindled to Ann and Lee.
Then the Cabbage Patch craze happened: the adorable little dolls arrived with birth certificates that bore one rather old-fashioned name combined with another of the same genre, though not commonly used together.
That generation of girls who loved their Cabbage Patch dolls has now come of age, and we see the effects: Formerly plain Melissa is Melissa Anne, Elizabeth is Elizabeth May, Amelia is Amelia Carole, Ashley is Ashley Angela, Laura is Laura Melanie. And so it goes...
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