National Brandon Day

The oldest layer of Brandon is not a person but a landscape. The English place name comes from Old English brom dun, "broom hill", and several English villages carry it.

People who lived at or near one of these places became known by it, so the first Brandons were surnames: a label for where someone was from, not what they were like. Only much later did the surname jump again, this time to a first name, which is why Brandon arrives on a birth certificate carrying a place rather than a quality.

As a first name, Brandon is mostly a 20th-century American story, and a steep one. It climbed for decades and then crested hard: it was the sixth most popular boys' name in the United States across 1992, 1993, and 1994, common enough that a single classroom might hold two or three. Then it slid, year after year, the way fashionable names do once they stop feeling new.

The fall was not gentle, and one recent year it dropped to its lowest standing on the Social Security Administration's annual list since 1969, the year before its long climb really began. The Brandons being celebrated on April 24 are, demographically, a cohort: a generation of boys named at the exact moment the name was everywhere.