At school I was one of many Michaels and my wife was one of many Sarahs, and now our eldest is one of many Ellies.
Our parents generation fished in a much smaller pool for names for kids - It seemed like my class at primary school only had 4 or 5 of boys and girls names to share between everyone - Steven, Mark, Andrew, Michael covered most of the lads Joanne, Julie, Sarah and Nichola covered pretty much all of the girls. And we were a big year group 50 or so split between two classes and very few exceptions to that set of names
One of the reasons we can have short-lived fads for names now people are much more varied in the choices they make with names so it only takes a small bump in popularity to get into the top 10, but a 'popular' name is nowhere near as popular as names were in the past.
By comparison to my own school years I worked with a class of primary kids recently. 40 in the group - no two shared a first name, but no weird, wacky, foreign or made up names either.
Growing up in a certain African country, for boys first names I remember an Elastic (Banda was the surname), Penis and Wireless amongst many others from weird uses of heard or written English. Can't see them catching on here somehow
