Jared

Jared climbs out of Genesis, where he appears as a patriarch said to have lived almost a thousand years, his Hebrew name Yared meaning descent. The Puritans loved such deep-cut Bible names; Jared surfaced again with a vengeance in the 1960s after the Western series The Big Valley gave it to a brooding Barkley brother. It peaked in the 1990s as a quintessential Gen-X sound and now rests at rank 393, mellower and less ubiquitous. Two syllables, the J soft, the d clean, it feels like denim and a hand-written letter. A name with scripture underneath its flannel.