Show of hands - who didn't see this coming?
(No one raises their hand.)
That's because everyone saw it coming. It was never a question of if it would happen, it was simply a matter of time.
Predictably, the last several months have seen a spike in the average number of births. Widely attributed to the fact that while last year the whole world was experiencing some level of quarantine, instead of moaning about how they were stuck indoors staring at the walls, many people were instead asking each other "Hey, wanna fuck?"
Established couples, roommates, friends. For some, sex became a fun way to alleviate boredom; a much needed break in the monotony by way of good ol' fashioned fucking.
And why not? Sure, there was a lot of sexting and camming and mutual masked masturbation, we put a lot of extra mileage on all of our toys, and Amazon became everybody's favorite porn site.
But as 6in of hard expanded to 6ft of horny suddenly "we're all gonna die someday anyway" became a viable excuse to close the social distance.
Our urges overtook us, all manners and mixtures of genders and identities. But as is often the result when eggs and sperm collide - babies happened.
Enter 2021.
Until the birth certificate people catch up the gender choices will continue to be just "male" and "female" and according to the Social Security Administration, so far this year the most popular baby names are Liam for boys and Sophia for girls.
But there was also this other phenomenon, the thing we all saw coming. The appearance of neat little bundles of germs, so-called "virus babies."
Yep, you guessed it, people started naming their babies after the damn virus. Really.
Perhaps the highest profile example of this is a couple in India who named their twins, a boy and a girl, Covid and Corona. Interestingly, the couple said that they might someday give their babies more distinctive, traditionally gender-specific names, but for now the twins can easily be identified by their pink and blue masks.
(I confess, I made up that last part.)
Other examples from around the world are:
Lockdown (very dungeon party meets WWF)
Sanitiser (queue all the jokes about squirting into someone's hand.)
Tina, as in quarantine
Demi, as in pandemic
Rhona, as in corona
And a man who named his son Covid Bryant, after the late Kobe Bryant, who died in a helicopter crash in early 2020 just as the whole covid thingy was really taking off.
(Ok I feel bad about that pun. Sorry.)
I've never met or heard of anyone named Plague or AIDS or Smallpox or Cancer or Polio or Flu. But maybe the trend will continue and in the future we will commemorate all sicknesses and infections and diseases and maladies of every shape and symptom just by fucking them into the following year's SSA list of Most Popular Baby Names.
