Ruby

A garnet-colored stone pried from the mines of Burma, set into Byzantine crowns and Victorian engagement rings, and finally into a small girl's name in the late nineteenth century. Ruby comes from the Latin ruber, red, and it carries all the heat of that one syllable: the Kenny Rogers song, Ruby Bridges walking into a newly desegregated New Orleans classroom in 1960 behind federal marshals, Jack Kerouac's dharma-chasing friends. The name cratered midcentury and came screaming back with the vintage revival. It currently ranks 63 and is given to about one in 459 girls. Small, bright, unmistakable. The name has teeth.