The most popular baby names have been delivered safely — safe being the operative word. So RIP Persephone, Hippolyta and Zeus. Britain has jumped on to the name blandwagon (well, new parents in England and Wales, anyway, because as I know from watching Monarch of Glen, nearly everyone in Scotland is called Hamish).

That castration of a name, Jack (short for boring John), is still top of the boys’ chart, while, the slightly racier, former girls’ No 1, Chloe (meaning blooming, which is almost a swear word. Fun!), has been knocked off her perch by the dull-sounding Emily (meaning industrious, and while industry is an admirable quality it is not something you want hanging forever round your neck on an H Samuel gold chain).

So why are we making such insipid choices? For truly we are: the rest of the Office of National Statistics’ line-up reads like an index of characters in a Victorian novel, in which everyone has tight buns and no buns (as in hair-dos and bread rolls). There is a surge in revivalist names: Ellie, Sophie and Lucy all make the girls’ Top Ten and Joshua, Thomas, and James the boys’. With Ella and Harry present and correct, it’s all gone terribly Milly-Molly-Mandy .

Names reveal a lot, not about their bearer but the hopes and fears of their parents. That those women on maternity wards in the 21st century are harking back to the 19th shows that they want to protect their young from something in the modern age. Parents, scared by documentaries about ten-year-old car-jackers, think that if they call their poppets Samuel (No 8) or Molly (No 19) they will enjoy midnight feasts rather than re-enact Grand Theft Auto III.

We also seem to be indulging in a backlash against celebrity culture (the “Heat magazine may be the perfect weight to hold while breastfeeding but I’m not calling my little duck Brooklyn” school). Now that celebrity is something to laugh at rather than aspire to, why would we want to name our children after theirs? So Kylie, once so popular, is out of sight. No trace of Paula Yates’s gaffes: no Tigerlily, no Fifi Trixibelle, no Peaches. In fact, nobody at all appears to be naming their children after soft fruits.

Why, even the celebrities are changing their habits (which could, of course, lead us mere mortals to call our kids Popeye Fiddlesticks in future, if only to distance ourselves). This week the pregnant Radio 1 DJ Sara Cox summed up the Zeitgeist. While not revealing names she was considering, she said: “Nothing too pop-starry. We won’t be calling it Lollipop Wolverhampton.”

Even the more off-kilter entries in the new chart are traditional in their origins. Like Marilyn and Shirley in the Fifties, they are influenced by the movies. But it’s the quieter talent that’s being focused on: Halle (Berry, the Oscar-winning actress), Ashton (Kutcher, the actor) and Roman (Coppola, the director son of Francis Ford) are all popular.

So is safe really better than potentially embarrassing? I’m four months pregnant and it has been my debate of the month (the debate of last month was whether to be sick on the Tube or on the platform). At the outset I was convinced our child would have the most original name of all. But it’s harder than it looks. I tried out Anemone on my husband and he could only say “an enema”. Then I threw Queenie, a family name, into the ring, but he attacked me for inverted snobbery, suggesting we buy her a pearly queen Babygro. The jury’s still out on Andromeda, but I’m not hopeful.

The truth is that in naming a child you’re being asked to do the impossible: make a decision on a stranger’s behalf without imposing your personal taste. After all, today’s parents are themselves the victims of the indulgent hippy names of the 1960s and 1970s, and the absurdly aspirational equivalents in the 1980s. Perhaps safe names are a way not just of protecting them from modern life, but from their parents.

A friend, whose aunt got his name wrong on the birth certificate, tells me it doesn’t really matter as long as it’s spelt right. But what if my child is dyslexic? Will I be making a horrible, self-referential joke at its expense? So, castrated or not, Jakk it is.

The author is Deputy Arts Editor of The Times

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