Bruce

The name derives from Brix, a settlement in Normandy, arriving in Britain as the surname de Brus after 1066. The fourteenth-century monarch Robert the Bruce fixed it in Scottish history. American registers recorded it from 1880 onward as it shifted into a standard given name.

A Bruce does not arrive by electric scooter. The name reads as someone with a metal toolbox, an unironic thermos, and a birth certificate from the Eisenhower administration. With sixty-two percent of living bearers belonging to the Baby Boom, it carries the quiet confidence of someone who remembers leaded gasoline. It peaked in 1956 at rank thirty-three and has spent subsequent decades declining to explain itself.