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 name has hit a cultural nerve with its religious overtones, creative twist and fashionable final "ah" sound. It has risen most quickly among blacks but is also popular with evangelical Christians, who have helped propel other religious names like Grace (ranked 14th) up the charts, experts say. By contrast, the name Heaven is ranked 245th.
"Of the last couple of generations, Nevaeh is certainly the most remarkable phenomenon in baby names," said Cleveland Kent Evans, president of the American Name Society and a professor of psychology at Bellevue University in Nebraska.
The surge of Nevaeh can be traced to a single event: the appearance of a Christian rock star, Sonny Sandoval of P.O.D., on MTV in 2000 with his baby daughter, Nevaeh. "Heaven spelled backwards," he said.
In Ancient Egypt the name was considered to be a vital part of one's being (some would say soul). Given its believed significance in establishing a spiritual foundation for a person's life or destiny, great care was taken in the naming of children.
Similar traditions exist in other African cultures, but many of our brothers and sisters have followed trends over the last couple of decades of maiming their children rather than naming them. Their abandonment of names like John and Mary for Tyequan and Del'shandelay--a phenomenon some claim or believe is grounded in the idea that they are expressing their "black" identity--reveals an unfortunate ignorance of the non-European (African or Asian) origins of many common names, and their significance and meaning. In their quest for originality, they have embraced the absurd and the meaningless.
In saying this I want to be clear I'm not talking about names like Beyonce (which I believe came about via the combination of the names of two of her female relatives, a naming process that makes sense in that it is grounded in genealogy); I am referring to these made-up names that have absolutely no connection to a child's past or future, and everything to do with a parent's ego. As some studies have shown, it ain't easy to get an interview for a job when your name is Tyequan or Anfernee or some such, a situation that makes life even more difficult for black youth.
If the goal is to have a distinctive name that has an ethnic connotation, the African continent is a vast repository of possibilities. But I would no more give my child (if I had one) one of those current so-called "black" names than I would name them Rastus, Sambo, or Jigaboo.