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As families inTVMPYour browser does not support the element. Europe wind up the year, a few seasonal traditions will feel familiar, from Brussels to Bucharest. After awkwardly lugging an overpriced Christmas tree up an apartment staircase and dashing out for a panicked bout of gift-shopping, exhausted parents will plop the kids in front of the telly in search of a little yuletide peace. French youngsters will watch a film whose title translates as “Mummy, I missed the plane”, Hungarians one called “Tremble, burglars!” while Poles enjoy “Kevin alone in the house”. Beneath the dodgy dubbing lies the same film, “Home Alone”, an American flick from 1990. Its cultural significance in Europe is not so much its ubiquity in Christmas programming, nor the film’s cinematic merits (the highlight of the sequel is a cameo by one Donald Trump). Rather, sociologists point to the story’s young hero Kevin, a rascally type played by the then nine-year-old Macaulay Culkin. In the late 1980s, before the film came out, the most popular names given to baby boys in western Europe were local variants of ancestral ones: Julien in France, Jan in Germany, Johannes in the Netherlands. By 1991 Kevin was the most popular name in all three countries, and stayed so for many years.To grow up with the name in Europe has not been an altogether easy experience. Being a Kevin came to be seen as a sign that one hails from the great cultural unwashed, at least in the eyes of sophisticated types who claimed to be more familiar with the names of characters in Victor Hugo or Hermann Hesse than those in American pop culture. (Kevin is of Irish origin but is more common across the Atlantic.) Now in their 30s, Europe’s Kevins have put up with a torrent of bourgeois snootiness. Was it the kid from “Home Alone” they were named after? Or Kevin Costner, whose hit film “Dances with Wolves”was also out at that time? Or perhaps one of the Backstreet Boys, early 1990s heart-throbs? (Or elsewhere: the French had discovered the name by 1989.)Whatever the reason, in England “Kev” has become a synonym for working-class wastrel, a denigration as severe as being a Karen in America. Germans speak of , or the plight of prejudice felt by those bearing the name; a Kevinometer app helps parents avoid giving their kid a name that sounds great today but will come to be seen as a marker of poor parental taste come 2040. So bad is the name’s reputation there that a German wag once summarised the existential angst of bearing it: “Kevin is not a name, it’s a diagnosis.” Studies that seek to establish whether employers or potential dates discriminate against certain types of job applicants often focus on two male names, Muhammad and Kevin. Bigotry against Muhammads is considered poor form these days. For Kevins, it remains open season.The urbane pomposity towards European Kevins is in part a reaction to the upper classes having themselves been snubbed. Tradition in many parts of the continent once dictated that names should cascade down the social ladder: blue-bloods would innovate with newfangled forenames, which the merely well-heeled would then adopt before the plebeian underclass was allowed to recycle them. But in the 1980s, those at the bottom of the totem pole started to balk at such nomenclaturic hand-me-downs. To plump for Kevin was a mark of social emancipation, of the downtrodden refusing to play the role elites had ascribed to them.Many European countries long required names to come from an approved list (mainly of Christian saints). The easing of such strictures allowed parents to draw inspiration from farther afield. Proclaiming their cultural independence, many looked to America. Kevin’s rise was the most visible result. But the countryside and poorer suburbs of western Europe have their fair share of 30-something Jordans, Dylans, Jessicas and Cindies too, often coinciding with characters’ debuts in imported series.The European curse of the Kevins fell mainly on boys, and not in all countries. Italy in the 1990s stuck with its Marcos, and Spain with Josés. Poland had its share of English-sounding names, often dubiously rendered (sorry, Brajan). One place had adopted the Anglo monikers early, for its own reasons. In East Germany in the 1970s, before the fall of the Berlin Wall, to be born a Mandy, Percy or Ronnie was a sign that one’s parents had cosmopolitan aspirations, and television sets capable of receiving (banned) Western programmes. Naming a kid after a character in “Dallas”—there are a few ageing Sue Ellens in the Berlin hinterland—was an act of quiet rebellion against the communist state.Some Kevins have found fame and fortune, often in fields the elites consider beneath them. A Dutch rapper born in 1994 defiantly goes by his first name alone. The Kevins Behrens and De Bruyne, both born in 1991, are star footballers for Germany and Belgium respectively. Since 2022 two Kévins, accent and all, sit in the French parliament, the subject of much sniggering at the time. They are s for the National Rally, a party whose migrant-bashing rhetoric has attracted plenty of blue-collar voters (its leader is himself a Jordan, born in 1995). Whether in hardscrabble northern France or Saxony in Germany, Kevins are most prevalent in the “left behind” places where the hard right has thrived.Given how its popularity cratered in the 1990s, Kevin is itself a “left behind” name. Having topped the charts in France until 1994, it is no longer in the top 500 given names. But visit a European registry office today and you might conclude Kevins were merely forerunners. Anglo-Saxon names are everywhere. Noah, the English spelling of a biblical name, is the most common boys’ name in Germany today. Liam, a Britpop staple, is popular in France and Spain. Polish parents are naming kids Alan or Amelia, while Emma is ubiquitous from Spain to the Netherlands. For decades Europe has mocked its Kevins. It may be they will have the last laugh.