Thursday, January 07, 2021
My extremely unscientific Mitch theory. I don't know why I can't just be normal, but I have long had a personal theory that Mitch is an iconic late-millennial/Gen Z name. So like a normal person I went to the NSW government list of popular baby names, got the data on the name Mitchell and plotted it in Excel.
I'm so annoyed that I couldn't figure out how to make Excel format the data properly. The data docs I was working from showed the top 100 names in a given year, ranked by popularity, so 90 is the 90th most popular name, and the most popular (9th) looks the lowest on the graph. It's been years since I used the graphing function of Excel and I am a word person not a maths and stats person!!
So it's a bit shit, but you can see that while the number of NSW babies named Mitchell peaked in 1990 with 811, its popularity as a proportion of all babies in a given year peaked in 1992 when it was the 9th most popular name, even though slightly fewer Mitchells (794) were named that year.
So you'd expect there to be lots of Mitchells aged around 29-30 at the moment.
NB: Within my survey period, Michael was the most popular boys' name in NSW in 1980 and 1981, and again in 1983, but was overtaken by Matthew in 1982, which was the most popular boys' name from 1984–1992 when it was overtaken by Joshua, which remained the most popular name until 2003 when it was overtaken by Jack, which ruled until 2009 when it was overtaken by William.
