Never heard that framing before. In New England the practice is associated with blue-blood wealth.

This appears not to have been rigorously studied. Anecdotally, the further west one goes in America the higher the likelihood a suffix indicates low SES.

Well it’s likely the adoption by the Latinx. I think that demo grows as you move west. In Texas it’s become more common in that demo and the redneck whites. The monied still have it but more commonly go towards super preppy names like Tripp, Shep, Archer, Preston. A common theme I see if you dig deeper is they name one of the boys the mom’s maiden surname. But in general, surnames as first names is very common in this demo. I mostly exist in this demo of WASPs and my wife has I think 4+ cousins named in the mom maiden name format, I didn’t realize it was a bigger thing until we had kids and learned a lot of our friends had also done this (I thought maybe just unique to my wife’s family, but bigger trend). My family wasn’t monied so I wasn’t really exposed to it until adulthood.

Sorry to bring up race but it’s the US and the SES is too highly correlated to ignore these in a data conversation and we all do things slightly differently roughly by race/background, there’s no monoculture in the US

Eh, in my experience it’s all over the place. Scottsdale’s suffixes are largely not Latin. Instead, it probably indicates someone who sells real estate or crypto.

Fun part is that no one can stop poor people from imitating rich ones, so they do. Then rich ones start coming up with other ways to show to the others that they’re rich and poor copy over and over again.

I used rich as shorthand placeholder of blue blood, noble, famous and rich. Not everyone who is rich is noble and noble doesn’t mean they are rich.

There have historically been a lot of ways poor people were stopped from imitating rich ones, and not just the obvious ones involving spending money. The US is pretty enlightened in that there are no name protection laws that I know of. In many European countries, you still need permission from every carrier of a rare last name if you want to take it.

There have historically been also ways where poor stopped rich from being rich and having fancy name was making one a target.

Yes. Like that William H Gates III from Seattle.

coming from europe: in my experience "fancy names" are either blue blood wealth OR regular people wanting to look like blue blood wealth. So I feel you both have a point here.

"Junior" might be associated with poor or rural people, but "III" and "IV" can only convey the absolute maximum level of pompousness.

I've known two people in my life who went by some version of Trey as a nickname, as in some slight change if tres, three.

Or 3 James was confusing so they probably had a James, a Jim, a JT. No attempt to obscure just trying to yell at a specific person when the trash needs to be taken out.

I know a lot of people that just go by their middle names in this scenario. Even my brother was named like this and the intent from the beginning was he’d go by his middle name.

I think maximum pompousness goes to those that make sure you know they’re a third or fourth. If I meet you at a cocktail party and will never meet you again, don’t introduce yourself as William H Gates the Third, just say Bill.