Debra

The name traces to the Hebrew noun for a bee. While the traditional spelling Deborah filled early twentieth-century registers, Debra emerged as a mid-century phonetic streamlining that dropped an unpronounced vowel. Bolstered by actress Debra Paget in the early nineteen-fifties, the trimmed spelling spread rapidly across American maternity wards.

The name reads as someone who keeps a metal ring of labeled keys in her purse and knows how to back a station wagon out of any driveway. It suggests an adulthood forged between nineteen-seventy and nineteen-ninety, soundtracked by AM radio and punctuated by laminate clipboards. With eighty percent of living bearers belonging to the baby boomer generation, the name rarely appears on an elementary school attendance sheet today. It peaked in 1955 and shows little interest in coming back.