"The shifting
fortunes of the name Lolita can be seen in its declining popularity.
According to the US Social Security Administration (SSA), the
popularity of Lolita peaked in the US in 1963, when it was the 467th
most popular name for newborn girls. It dropped after that, and has not
made an appearance in the SSA's top 1,000 names since 1973."
Often, it's real life that affects a name's popularity -- there still
aren't too many people in the US naming their sons Adolph. But fiction
can do it too. It's possible that the first splash that started the
Madison wave (she's been second or third most popular since 2000) was
Splash. The year after that movie appeared, the name went from #625 to
about #366, five years later it was #128, and the trend continued.
As for Lolita, in the 1940s, it was the 934th most popular name, a bit
behind Jacqueline and Kristen, a bit ahead of Delilah. She drops out
of the top 1000 in the 1950s, comes back in the 60s (about 2400 girls
were given that name in that decade), then drops off the charts. For a
graph, go here:
http://www.babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html
What does it mean now when someone names their daughter Lolita? I
don't know about real life, but in fiction, take a look at the film
Broken Flowers, where the Sharon Stone character has named her
now-teenage daughter Lolita, with a significance that's rather obvious.