In 1991, I was preparing to publish my first book, about a year I spent teaching junior high school in Japan.  Stephen Birmingham, the author of “Our Crowd” and an acquaintance of my parents, offered to give me a blurb but recommended one change: that I drop the middle initial from my name on the cover.  As a 26-year-old, baby-faced writer, I was eager to appear older and more sophisticated, so I ignored him. 

I’ve regretted it ever since. 

I thought of that incident this spring when the actress Ann B. Davis from “The Brady Bunch” died at 88.  Her middle initial, so central to her name, seemed so out of place in the more casual air of contemporary life.  Was it just my ear or had Mr. Birmingham been right all along?  Is the middle initial in decline? 

The short answer is yes.  John Q. Public has spoken: Time to K.O. the Q.

The middle initial is actually a relatively recent invention.  Middle names first began to appear in Europe in the late Middle Ages, but they weren’t widely used until the 19th century, when populations boomed and people needed more names to distinguish themselves.  Studies show that fewer than 5 percent of Americans born during the Revolutionary Era had middle names; by 1900, nearly every American had one. 

With middle names more common, middle initials became ubiquitous in the 20th century.  A string of seven consecutive presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt to Gerald R. Ford, used one. ( In the case of Harry S. Truman, the “S” didn’t stand for anything; it was a compromise of family names.)  Writers employed them, including Alice B. Toklas, William S. Burroughs, William F. Buckley and Hunter S. Thompson.  Even fictional characters had them: James T. Kirk, Wile E. Coyote, Homer J. Simpson.