When I heard, via Page Six, that actress Amanda Peet (Studio 60; Syriana) had given birth to a baby girl, it looked like another one for the celebrity baby “No-Name” club. The terse annoucement in the New York Post about the February 20 arrival of a daughter for Peet, and her husband, screenwriter David Benioff, (Troy) listed no name for the newborn.  

My spirits sank.

But it was only a short time before People came to the rescue, informing all who cared that Peet’s new baby is named Frances Pen.

I almost wished Peet and Benioff had opted for the “No-Name” club.

Pen, I learned, is short for Penny, Amanda Peet’s mother. Not to state the obvious here, but why not stick with the original and call her Penny? Perfectly nice name, if a little diminutive. But Pen? What’s the point of that?

As if to emphasize their tin ear for good baby names, Peet and Benioff bestowed on their little bundle of joy the first name Frances.

If you go to the Social Security Administration’s popular baby name page, and plug the name Frances into their whizzbang little data base, you’ll see that Frances has been on an almost perfect downward vector for the last one hundred years. It reached the height of its popularity during World War 1, when it ranked as the # 9 most popular girl’s name in the U.S. But it has been heading downhill ever since. By 2005, Frances ranked # 761 in U.S. popularity, and seems to be on its way out of the top 1000.

I wonder why.

Some old-fashioned names, like Emily, have become very popular again. And some, like Gertrude, Edna, and Frances, have not. Figuring out which is which is the job of all prospective parents, celebrity or not.

So Amanda Peet’s baby girl is not going to join the celebrity baby “No-Name” club. But maybe it would have been better if she had.

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photo by Photorazzi 

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