Percy

Derived from Norman French toponyms like Percy-en-Auge in Calvados, the name traveled to England with the Conquest and became the surname of the powerful Earls of Northumberland. English families shifted it to the first-name slot by the seventeenth century. In the United States, it entered the civil registry in 1880 as an established import.

The name suggests fountain pens, train timetables, and heavy wool overcoats. Most people picture either a nineteenth-century English poet or a very polite steam engine. In practice, the average living Percy in America is fifty-six years old. It carries the specific air of someone who owns a magnifying glass for non-ironic reasons.