It was apparently the most common boy's name for year of my birth. My dad swears this is due to the popularity of Michael Jordan, the basketball player, at the time. During my lifetime, a softcore pornographic model, Katie Price, became a major British celebrity, under the pseudonym 'Jordan'. Ever since, 'Jordan' has immediately evoked the idea of a vapid airhead with undeserved fame and fortune and a hundred bestselling autobiographies she didn't write.
The name has no merits of its own, either. The sound is boring. Jor-den. Jor-den. The meaning is even more boring - it's Hebrew for "flowing down", which is an all right, if simplistic, name for a river, and even for a country named after a river, but a shite name for a person.
Alexander, conversely, while perhaps more common in general than 'Jordan', is a good, old name. It evokes Alexander the Great. It's my dad's name, my great-great-grandad's name, and my great-great-great-great-grandad's name, as well as the name of many distant granduncles through the generations. It has a nice, varied sound with a stress in the middle and a couple of interesting double consonants. All in all, it's a far better name.
James means "he who supplants". It's not great, but it's better than "flowing down", and it doesn't sound like a product of the age when everyone was "Just trying to do something, different, you know?" by giving their children stupid, made-up, cross-cultural or archaic names and putting pebbles in bowls on their coffee tables. It's genuine at least, not all, "Look at me! I called my son Toblambash! It doesn't mean anything and so did everyone else this year! I'm my own special person!"
