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Re: Paige
Yeah, I do agree that "classic" and "in my lifetime" are mutually exclusive . That's my story, and I'm sticking to it! But your answer has got me even more puzzled: the Patti Page and Janis Paige connection could have sparked off a trend - didn't that happen with Grace Kelly's surname, at much the same time? - but at the same time there was the pageboy haircut for women that was seen on every street, and therefore much more widely known than these entertainers, and I'd have thought that it would have neutralised the celeb effect (having one's hair cut in a a bob didn't give rise to an epidemic of Roberts and Robertas, and Robyn came too late).Oh, and in South Africa the Page people outnumber the Paiges quite massively according to the telephone directory! I've never met a ln Paige, and so I assumed that Page had been prettified. Thanks!
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Actually you can't attribute Kelly as a female given name to Grace Kelly. The name first enters the SSA top 1000 list in 1948, two years before Grace Kelly's first appearance on television and four years before the film High Noon which made her a movie star.
I'm not sure what caused Kelly's initial regular use as a female name, but its real sudden boom which made it decidedly more female than male in the USA definitely comes from the character Kelly Gregg, a teenage girl on the television situation comedy Bachelor Father, which started in 1957.

This message was edited 2/28/2007, 7:55 AM

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