Isn't that a girl's name?

The admin at my office is pregnant. Last week she found out it's a girl.

One of the guys in the office, by the way, argued quite passionately with her over that. She "shouldn't", he said; she "should" "wait and find out" when it was born. That was the "right" and "best" way. Why do people feel the need to impose their own emotional choices on others? Just for validation? But I digress.

She told me that she was glad it was a girl because naming a girl would be so much easier. The problem is that her husband wanted to name a boy Cameron.

And the problem with Cameron? She thinks it's a girl's name. Like Cameron Diaz. And so do most of her friends - she was surprised I didn't think so (of course, I am thirty years older); her husband's cluelessness is apparently to be expected...

Now we all know that you can give a boy's name to a girl - though probably, Miss Michael Learned notwithstanding, not Michael or Jeffery or Richard (though my boss once worked for a woman named Brian) - and it's okay. But you can't give even an odd girl's name to a boy. Once enough girls get the name, it's off-limits for boys. In the USA, Evelyn is forever a girl's name. Robin, too, despite Robin Hood and Robin Masters - I had someone seriously argue that that character was supposed to be like Sarah Caudwell's Hilary Tamar, of always unspecified gender, despite the actual frequent use of "he, him, his" by others referring to Masters (and, of course, Hilary (one or two L's) is a girl's name here). And the classic example is, I suppose, Florence: once Miss Florence Nightingale became world famous, Flo Ziegfield and Flurry Knox were things of the past.

So "Cameron" has now hit that magic percentile - at least for some people.