I'm okay with censoring this bit of history (the vandal's name, not the event itself) personally, but that's beside the point. This whole article is arguing against publicizing the acts of fame-seeking criminals yet repeats <OMITTED> many times proving that his strategy worked. It's an oxymoron or something.

Also, I think your logic is faulty. If no one knows <OMITTED>'s name then they can't know to be embarrassed to share it with him. If the ancients had decreed that anyone who had the same name must change their name that would have let the cat out of the bag, eh? I think it must be that the ban was on telling the name of the vandal, not on the name itself.

Once Herostratus's name is brought up, I think it will be fair to mention that the temple he burned was built by Chersiphron and Metagenes.

As the article mentions, the name was already in decline well before Glitter was a factor. It just belongs to a certain tradition of English names that are slowly disappearing. Some of them disappear because they now sound pompous (like Harold), some because they sound too “vulgar” (which imho is the case for Gary). A lot of names survived only thanks to rigid traditions (“firstborn will have the grandparent’s name”) that have been slowly dismantled for a couple of generations.

If you really want to talk “infamous” names, you should pick the two classic examples: Adolf and Benito.

It probably has little-to-no effect on the decline in popularity of the name (especially looking at the time lines), but ‘A Gary’ has been a pejorative term for a bad skier for at least 20 years, if not longer.

I ski, but I’ve never heard of “a Gary”. Can I ask whereabouts you live?

I’m in the Pacific Northwest (from Portland, currently in Southern Oregon, moving to Bend in a few weeks). I heard the term primarily from East Coasters when I skied at Alta way-back-when. By the time I was skiing all over the place, around ‘04, it was ubiquitous everywhere I skied, at least for park skiers - Colorado, Washington, Oregon, Utah, Montana... It was the ski equivalent of n00b. I’m old now, so I’m not sure if it has had any longevity as a slang term.