Valeriya Safronova

So when she became pregnant again that year, Acosta knew exactly the name her daughter would have: Khaleesi, which essentially means “queen” in the made-up language Dothraki. It is also one of the many titles held by Daenerys Targaryen, a main character on the show and one of the contenders for the Iron Throne.

“Her character loses the baby and then she gets stronger again,” Acosta said. “She defeats all the odds. She knows what she wants.”

Acosta’s own Khaleesi defeated some odds, too. Her daughter was born two months early and spent two weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit (where a nurse said she was planning to name her own daughter Arya, after another of the show’s female leads).

“I saw her as my little miracle,” Acosta said.

Since “Game of Thrones” premiered on HBO in 2011, the name Khaleesi has moved from the screen into real life; in 2017, it was the 630th most popular name given to girls, according to the Social Security Administration, making it more popular than Brittany or Britney. By contrast, Hermione and Katniss, the names of two other extremely popular female characters in literature and on the screen, never broke into the top 1,000.

Khaleesi has also been on the rise in the U.K., where some parents are adding creative flourishes. In 2017, Scotland welcomed a Khaleesi-Destiny and a Khaleesi-Grace, and last year, a Khaleesi-Marie joined their ranks.

But the most popular baby name associated with “Game of Thrones” appears to be Arya. It’s not clear how much the show has to do with that; variations of Arya have been around long before the book came out (in India, Indonesia and Iran, for example). But Arya did not break into the top 1,000 U.S. names until 2010, and instances of the name before then appear to be mostly for boys. Since 2010, Arya has steadily risen in popularity to 135th place, with 2,156 babies born in 2017 taking the name.

One of those babies is the daughter of Marina Lippincott, founder of MAKDigitalDesign, a company based in New Jersey, who has been a devoted “Game of Thrones” viewer since the show’s debut. She read the books before the show came out, and has re-watched all the televised seasons before each and every new season premiere. Her baby shower had a “Game of Thrones” theme.

“Some people think I took my obsession with the show too far,” Lippincott said of naming her daughter Arya. “I don’t really care. Arya knows who she is, and that’s who she wants to be. She goes and gets it. Nothing stops her — not even that she’s a small girl.”

Also cropping up on birth certificates is Daenerys, which is less popular than Khaleesi despite the fact that it is that character’s given name. The year 2017 also saw the arrival of 20 Sansas, 11 Cerseis, 55 Tyrions and 23 Theons in the United States. Pet parents are joining the trend, too, with dogs named “Jorah Mormutt,” Asha and Tyrion, and cats called Lady and Drogo.

One pair of parents-to-be plan to honor the show in a less obvious way, and naming their daughter, due in August, Winter. Christina Jettie and her husband, the proud parents to be, often say to each other: “Winter is coming.”

“My husband and I met when Season 1 started,” said Jettie, an environmental engineer based in South Carolina. “He invited me over to watch it with his roommates. They were the only ones who had HBO. We got hooked immediately. Our first dates were getting together on Sundays and watching it.”

For their honeymoon, the couple went to Iceland, where a number of the show’s scenes were shot, and joined a “Game of Thrones” tour.

A name like Winter skirts an issue some parents have run up against: confusion around spelling and pronunciation. Kaylee Finney, mother of a 4-month-old named Arya, watches “Game of Thrones” with her family, who are equally compelled by it.

“We watched all seven seasons within four days,” Finney said. “I have seen the first seven seasons at least 100 times. I know it word for word.”

But other people she meets in Oklahoma, where she lives, do not know the show that well.

“Nobody knows where I got the name,” Finney said. “They have trouble pronouncing it. They call her Ay-ria.”

Mispronunciation is a problem that Jamie Chang also knows well when it comes to her 15-monh-old daughter Khaleesi.

“At the doctor’s office they call Kuh-less-ee, or by her last name,” Chang said.

“The H throws everybody off,” Chang said. “Some people think it’s two Ss, some people think it ends with a Y.”

But Chang thinks that in a decade or so, when Khaleesi is a teenager, her cohort will recognize the name, where it originated and what it stands for: “Strength,” Chang said. “She’s definitely a woman who knows her power, knows what she wants.”

Overall, Chang said she is happy with the name, despite the spelling errors and some of the backlash she has received.

“Someone on Twitter was like, ‘How stupid. You named her after a fictional language,’” Chang said. “It might be fictional, but everybody knows what it stands for. It means queen. Anyway, who is to say what is a real name and what isn’t?”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/29/style/game-of-thrones-baby-names.html" id="9795dc2a-a9a6-35ed-af17-5563669256cc">The New York Times</a>.

When Katherine Acosta, who lives in Houston, was prescribed bed rest after a miscarriage in 2017, she started watching “Game of Thrones” for the first time. Within a week, she had seen all seven seasons. Then, she watched all of the episodes twice more.

Hello, Arya! 'Game of Thrones' Baby Names Are for Girls.

<h1>In the premiere episode of “Job or No Job,” which ran on ABC Family in 2015 for one season, Jane Buckingham explains why she signed on to host the show, in which she gives millennials career guidance. “I have seen so many young people trying to find a great job but most don’t have the tools they need,” Buckingham says. “People under 30 have some of the highest levels of unemployment in the country.”</h1>

But, she said, “nobody’s ever told them what they don’t want to hear.”

The conceit of the show was that Buckingham, founder and chief executive of a youth marketing consultancy called Trendera and an author of advice books, would coach recent college graduates on real-world skills, like preparing for job interviews. “It’s pretty clear that young people have some misconceptions about what’s acceptable and what’s not,” she told The Observer in 2015 about her motivation. “I don’t think that that’s because they’re arrogant or anything like that, I just think no one’s giving it to them straight and I can do that,” she said.

“You’ll see some people acting so entitled that you want to slap them,” Buckingham said in that same interview, talking about what to expect from the show. “You’ll see some people disagree with me and people that just don’t like me telling them what to do. And, you’ll see candidates getting jobs that they shouldn’t, others getting jobs that they should, and still others getting passed over for jobs that they really deserved.”

On Tuesday, Buckingham was one of the dozens of people charged with participating in large-scale fraud scheme, hatched to game the college admissions process. According to the complaint filed by federal investigators, Buckingham agreed to pay a bribe of $50,000 to a phony foundation in order to have someone else take the ACT college-entrance exam on behalf of her son Jack, earning him a 35 out of 36 points. Marcus Buckingham, Jane Buckingham’s former husband, was not charged.

On Wednesday, Jack Buckingham released a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, saying: “I am upset that I was unknowingly involved in a large scheme that helps give kids who may not work as hard as others an advantage over those who truly deserve those spots.” Buckingham said that he hopes that “this might help finally cut down on money and wealth being such a heavy factor in college admissions.” According to the complaint, Jane Buckingham wanted to administer a copy of the test to Jack so that he would believe that he had taken it.

Buckingham was not reached for comment through her company or her publisher, HarperCollins.

Until Thursday, when most of the pages on its website disappeared, Trendera, Buckingham’s marketing firm, listed Netflix, HBO, Facebook, Condé Nast and Target as clients. The firm helps clients reach younger demographics. Though Buckingham founded Trendera in 2009, she has been analyzing youthful interests for much longer. In the late ‘90s, she founded Youth Intelligence, a consulting firm with services similar to Trendera’s; it was later renamed The Intelligence Group.

Creative Artists Agency bought that firm in 2003, and Buckingham stayed on as its head for several years. According to the Los Angeles Times, as part of her consulting services, Buckingham led a “Trend School” in which participants paid $2,500 a head for the chance to look into the hearts and minds of Generation Xers and millennials. For those not interested in attending “Trend School,” the Intelligence Group published the crib notes in reports that were sent out several times a year for a $35,000 annual subscription.

At Trendera, Buckingham and her team continued to produce reports for a fee. For a time, they referred to Generation Z, the cohort that includes people born between 1995 and 2010, as Generation V — the “V” was for viral. By 2017, they adopted the more common term in a report on the demographic, which included a section called “Decoding Gen Z Communication” that defined terms like “issa,” “velfie” and “tings.”

Buckingham is also the author of a series called “Modern Girl’s Guides,” which offers tips on topics like what tools to keep in the kitchen or how to write a cover letter. The introduction to the first of these, “The Modern Girl’s Guide to Life,” promises to “let you cheat without getting caught — or even feel like you’re cheating.” The book inspired a series of the same name, which ran on the now-defunct Style Network for three seasons.

The third book in Buckingham’s series, “The Modern Girl’s Guide to Sticky Situations,” came out in 2010. (The second was a guide to motherhood.) Felicity Huffman, another of the parents charged in the college bribery scheme, was one of the guests at its launch party. The book, Buckingham wrote in the introduction, is “a stack of get-out-of-jail-free cards for the deserving gal with the best intentions and a moment of bad luck.”

To comfort worried readers, she wrote: “Most hideous predicaments are not the end of the world.”

This article originally appeared in <a id="da3eb2aa-3e2d-40bb-b110-5a13f8d1f0b4" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/14/style/jane-buckingham-college-fraud.html">The New York Times</a>.

Jane Buckingham, expert on youth marketing, charged in college fraud scandal

The conceit of the show was that Buckingham, founder and chief executive of a youth marketing consultancy called Trendera and an author of advice books, would coach recent college graduates on real-world skills, like preparing for job interviews.

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Valeriya Safronova

Articles written by the author

Hello, Arya! 'Game of Thrones' Baby Names Are for Girls.

Jane Buckingham, expert on youth marketing, charged in college fraud scandal