I think the name “Adolf” is as close as any baby name book gets to the kind of controversy normal books, newspapers, and magazines can stir up. Somehow, I don’t think that name is ever going to recover. It comes up pretty quickly in the alphabet, so they don’t get long to ignore it, either. I’m sure every hot-shot “Letter A” editor thinks he’ll break the mold and include it, and then the heat comes down on him, hard.
“We can’t ignore it!” he screams from his office, walls adorned in different calligraphies of the letter “a”. “It’s a legitimate name, you know!”
“Not in America, it isn’t,” quips the wizened “Letters X, Y, Z” editor, whose weary eyes belie his number of similar battles.
Then, when the book comes out, the “Letter A” editor comes to work to find a copy on his desk. He excitedly flips through his section, hoping that the Baby Name Book corporate fat cats had a change of heart. They hadn’t, but there’s a bookmark in the final chapter. It marks an entry titled “Zadolf”.
The two editors become life-long friends.
Good point. You’re referring to WWII, right?