Power Laws, Weblogs, and Your Given Name

gummint writes "After contemplating the blogsphere and pondering whether "diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality", consider an old-media domain name: the one your parents gave you. How did they choose it? How many other persons have the same one? Get some facts, or a lot of facts. Or just comment anyway. The good news is that the extent of inequality can change massively over time: the popularity of the most popular given names has decreased dramatically since the Industrial Revolution."

Comments

Two names and two surnames...

[mfarah]

Don't you hate when there's several people with the same name as yours? I know more than 10 different "Miguel Farah" besides myself, and that's only within my family.

That's why most spanish-speaking countries keep using the two names + two surnames (the father's and the mother's) method for the full name of a person. That way, my full name is "Miguel Braxton Farah Fugate", which decreases dramatically the probabilty of a name collision (even more for people with relatively uncommon surnames, like myself).

This practice was started somewhere in the Middle ages, and while it's not as good as a unique number or ID, the cases of people with two identical full names are very rare.

The Rise of Ryan

[ryants]

I took a look at my name:

• 1940s not even in the top 1000
• 1950s #622
• 1960s #242
• 1970s #26
• 1980s #14
• 1990s #15

and that's about where Ryan has been stuck now for 10 years, floating between #17 and #12.

I was born in 1974. I wonder what happened in the 1950s - 1960s that caused such an upswing? I can't think of any popular celebrities named Ryan from that era. Any insights?

Re:Data from the government

[bko]

Very nifty db. If i had moderator points, i would be slightly tempted to mod you up rather than post. Slightly.

Favorite stat from 10 seconds of perusal:

Popularity of the name Trinity:

Year of birth Rank
2001 67
2000 74
1999 216
1998 555
1997 547
1996 687
1995 683
1994 821
1993 951

Curious, isn't it. Something seems to have caused a sudden jump in popularity in the middle of 1999!

While i really enjoyed the matrix, i can't say that it ever occured to me that it would cause a sudden spike in people naming their daughters trinity.

my parents were very un-original

[BigBir3d]

Christopher Jason Smith

When I had shoulder surgery in 1993, there was another Christopher J Smith there for the same basic operation, on the other shoulder. Of course the anesthesiologist switched the files! Basic idea was to put meds in one arm, operate on the other. He was rather offended when I yanked the I.V. out of my arm while asking "what are the first 3 numbers of the SSN on that chart?" Ten minutes later, after some ID checking and whatnot, I was on my way to dreamland.

What's a Last Name?

[linuxdoctor]

My own family didn't have last names until after the First World War and the loss land and power after that war. We were identified by our membership in particular Royal houses. We were addressed as Emperor, or King, or Duke, or Prince with the appropriate titles that went with it.

With the First World War and beginning with the English Royal Family abandoning it's German roots by adopting the name of Windsor, they set the tone for the dismantling of the house system. My great-great-granduncle, German Kaiser Wilhelm II at the time of the English abandonment of their heritage, remarked that he always enjoyed the comic operetta "The Merry Wives of Saxe-Cobourg-Gotha," a reference to the British Royal family's true German name. Two of those house names are also part of my name.

My own grandfather, an Archduke in the Austrian Empire had to abandon his titles and adopted a name that was taken from the name of the his ancestral home in the south of Austria. He was later appraoched by Hitler to help with the union of Austria and Germany, but categorically refused him. After the anschlus in 1938 his vocal anti-Nazi stance got him into more trouble and his lands were seized.

This is all probably not very interesting, and I'll probably loose a few karma point by this post. But who cares? There is no such thing as Karma anyway.

Re:Screw my given name

[namespan]

Might work in some polynesian languages. You can go entire sentences in Samoan w/o using a single consonant (well... unless you count the glottal stop). O a'u ia (I am a fish). OK, that one may not come up often, but I seem to recall that the word for "learning" also has no consonants, so "I am learning" wouldn't have any.

And I've met Samoans whose names were entire sentences. Fa'alelalolagi (like that which is below the heavens, I think).