Now that’s not nice….

The New York Times has an article about a sudden trend in naming babies:

Chances are you don't have any friends named Nevaeh. Chances are today's toddlers will.

In 1999, there were only eight newborn American girls named Nevaeh. Last year, it was the 70th-most-popular name for baby girls, ahead of Sara, Vanessa and Amanda.

The spectacular rise of Nevaeh (commonly pronounced nah-VAY-uh) has little precedent, name experts say. They watched it break into the top 1,000 of girls' names in 2001 at No. 266, the third-highest debut ever. Four years later it cracked the top 100 with 4,457 newborn Nevaehs, having made the fastest climb among all names in more than a century, the entire period for which the Social Security Administration has such records.

Nevaeh is not in the Bible or any religious text. It is not from a foreign language. It is not the name of a celebrity, real or fictional.

Nevaeh is Heaven spelled backward.

The article goes on to explain the major demographics behind the trend (blacks and evangelicals) and the meme that spread it (Christian rocker Sonny Sandoval's public announcement about how he chose his baby's name). It's all very innocuous and, indeed, rather interesting.

What got my goat was the title the Times assigned to the article: "And if It's a Boy, Will It Be Lleh?" To me, that falls into the category of knee-jerk boy-bashing. I'm not going to go out and protest. I'm not even going to write a letter to the editor about this mean-ness. But in the confines of my own blog, I'll end where I began: That's not nice.