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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."
Sort by decade or year of birth. Pretty interesting, imo. It's fun to watch which names stay on the top 10 for decades in a row and which were popular at one point and then declined dramatically.
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When I was a lad still living on the Indian reserve I asked "Father, how did you name me?" he replied "Son, when a new child is born into our tribe, the father looks at the landscape and names the child after the first thing he sees.
I nodded "Ok, go on."
"For instance," my father continued, "your sister 'Soaring Eagle' was named after an eagle I saw high in the sky. Does this answer your question, Two Dogs Fucking?"
Trolling is a art,
Many countries have laws to prevent this sort of thing. Im not sure about the U.S., but Germany requires that someone be named with an "appropriate" name, and in the case of dual nationality, they should have a name appropriate in both countries. A recent example was when a Turkish couple wanted to name their child Osama, but that was not allowed.
Previously in Belgium, you had to use a name from an approved list, which means that if you were dual nationality Belgium/Spanish, Miguel would become Michell, or Santiago may become James.. (Im not positive what santiago would become, its just an example)....
but anyway, in many places, I dont think you can actually change your name to: qwrtpsdfghjklñzxcvbnm....
But then Cher has done well.. I should change mine to "Z", just like MIB...
-- -- Warning. Do not stare directly at the sun.
My mother had this idea that she was going to name me Robert Keith, but call me Keith. My dad asked why they couldn't just name me Keith Robert. Mom said that it "didn't sound as good." Dad asked what difference it made how it sounds if nobody would use it that way. Dad's Lesson Learned: Do Not Argue With Pregnant Women. I think he slept in the garage.
At my birth, Mom took one look at me and decided that I was the spitting image of her grandfather. She decided to name me after him, so she called me Robert Scott. Problem is, her grandpa's name was DAVID. For a long time, I thought it must have been the painkillers talking, but Grandpa David was born in Scotland, and so everyone called him Scotty.
He *hated that. He thought it was akin to calling someone Polack, or Czech-boy, or Canook. He probably spins like a gyroscope every time someone uses my name.
Scott
Ad luna, Alicia! Ad luna!
My last name is Case, and my father wanted to name me Justin. My mother threatened him with unspecified dire consequences.
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I was having a little thought experiment going through these lists of names and such, and something dawned on me. It's fairly obvious from the data on these lists that men's names hang around a lot longer than women, and generally, it seems the top 10 was very stable in males (up until very recently, I had no idea Jacob was that popular...) while female names change top 10 at least once a generation. I was thnking why this happened, and when you think of female names, there are definitely "old" sounding names compared to males. No one thinks James or Robert sounds old, but Mildred and Ruth sound like older women's names. The one thing that came to me is that women "don't want to end up like their mother" while men look up to their father, even after he chops your hand off in a lightsaber battle. It seems like women's names gain a stigma of "old", and it's worse for a woman to be old than a man, so women name their daughter's newer, cuter names, where men respect their elders more (or something), so continue the line of Michael's and William's. Or I'm a sexist nutjob who should actually be working at work instead of reading /.
Th
Actually I think the most applicable quote is this one:
Michael: Yeah, well, at least your name isn't Michael Bolton.
Samir: You know, there's nothing wrong with that name.
Michael: There WAS nothing wrong with it. Until I was about 12 years old, and that no-talent ass clown became famous and started winning Grammys.
Samir: Well, why don't you just go by Mike instead of Michael?.
Michael: No way! Why should I change? He's the one who sucks!
What exactly is the pronounciation? Is it something like "ka-ching gal"? :)
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.