The Age of E

March 2009

It is the Age of E

Of course there is e-mail and e-commerce and e-business and all those e’s we all know about, but it’s less often remarked that about 99-and-a-half-percent of children who are born at the moment are given a name that ends in the ee sound. There’s Chloe and Zoe and Poppy and Molly and Archie and Alfie and Harry and Evie. Everyone (well, OK, nearly everyone) gives their child an e-name.

Before the Age of E it was the Age of D

The age of E is of relatively recent provenance. Before that, it was the age of D. Following on from D-Day (there were all sorts of minor D-Days for various people after the Normandy Landings in 1944), we had de-militarisation and d-isarmament and demarcation and dehumidifiers, and people called their children David and Derek and Donald and Douglas and Denis and Dorothy and Diane and Donna and Dawn – all names that pretty-well no one gets called now.

Roll on the Age of F

Surely the Age of F must naturally and inexorable and subconsciously follow the Age of E. In the age of F, all those people, by now young adults, who have e-names will be thought of as effing old fashioned.