Do you love Jane Austen, Mad Men, and The Hunger Games? This baby name is for you!

If you enjoy Jane Austen, but you wish the characters could wear fashions more appropriate to the Mad Men era, you would love Honey for Tea by Elizabeth Cadell. And if you're pregnant with a baby girl (I know I'm significantly narrowing the field here), you might find a charming baby name within the pages of this book. And if, by fateful chance, you also like The Hunger Games, well, brace yourself for the baby name of a lifetime:

Jendiss

You read that right: Jendiss. Sort of like Katniss but with a more genteel, less violent flavor. Jendiss Marsh is a well-bred British girl who has been in love with Allen as long as she can remember. But Allen has been in love with Jendy's (notice the cute nickname) older, gorgeous sister Nancy for the same amount of time.

Four weeks before the wedding, Nancy calls off the wedding. Jendy is shocked and disappointed in her sister, but really, does this sound like a bad development? No, of course not.

But before I get carried away by this story, which I'm very much enjoying if you can't tell, let's talk about the possibilities of this baby name.

It sounds like a made-up name, which I am firmly against, as you know. So I googled "Jendiss" and came up with one person in the United States named "Jendiss Frizzell," which sounds like a Dickens character. In Elizabeth Cadell's novel, Jendiss is a family name traced back to 1583. That's pretty presumptuous of her, to take a name like "Jendiss" and give it a long and illustrious pedigree. I love presumption in novelists, don't you?

Anyway, I think Jendiss is a great baby girl name. It has a youthful nickname, a feminine sound, a literary bent, and a place all its own on the kindergarten roll.

Your Baby's Name: An Original? Or Everybody's Taste?

This book is out of print, and I haven't yet found a copy of it anywhere, but I plan to. A Matter of Taste by Stanley Lieberson won the 2001 Book Award given by the Culture Section of the American Sociological Association, and it sounds intriguing. Here's the premise: Harvard University Professor Stanley Lieberson studied children's first names to develop an original theory of fashion. He felt that children's names could provide an opportunity to see the pure mechanisms of fashion in action. People don't have to have a lot of money to name a baby the way they have to have a lot of money to buy diamond earrings at Tiffany's, so baby naming is a chance to show your style without buying anything (well, you still have to pay that outrageous hospital bill).

Using his research techniques, Lieberson examines why the names of certain important and attractive biblical characters are rarely chose, what the influence of movie stars and film characters is in baby naming, and how different ethnic groups exhibit their assimilation into broader populations by the names they choose.

I've wondered about these issues myself. Why are there little Aidens (Aydens, Aadens, Adens) running around everywhere and there's nary a George to be found? And how did that Irish name gain such popularity anyway?

If you find a copy of this book, let me know where you found it. I'm dying to read it.