Not on your Nellie

A consumer and marketing analysis company called CACI has developed a means of predicting the likely age of someone with a particular first name (UK only). Thus, if you are a Percy or a Horace, you fall into a group with an average age of 75.

Some names are recurring after a fall from fashion: a third of all Emilys are aged over 60, but more than 40% are under 25; many Claras are in their 80s but there are quite a few under 25.

Tracey began to appear about 45 years ago and remained popular for a decade, and Darren was popular for about the same length of time.

Sadly, it seems that Sissie, Bessie and Nellie are hardly ever chosen nowadays, though the latter might have a renaissance if the Canadian singer-songwriter Nelly Furtado stays well-known for a while. Just one celebrity, even a C-list one, can have a huge effect on a name’s popularity: Selina suddenly became popular 25 years ago when a woman called Selina Scott achieved modest fame as an announcer.

Footnote about Nellie/Nelly:
The one I remember is the great Nellie Lutcher; I guess that puts me in the same age group as the Percys and Horaces.

The title of this post means not on your life. It was originally not on your Nellie Duff; via rhyming slang duff=puff, then puff=breath, and life and breath are inseparable, as we may gather from Acts, 17,25: He giveth to all, life and breath. Got that? Oh, and puff may be the origin of poof, via powder-puff.

For this supremely useless information I am indebted to Eric Partridge’s marvellous Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Its eighth edition, 1984, has 1400 pages, with treasures on every one. I look forward to writing a post about it soon.

P.S. Perhaps the name was originally made famous by a schooner named Nellie Duff which sank in 1895, but the OED cannot find the phrase not on your nellie in print earlier than 1941..