Author listing: Katy Blumer, Kate Donahue, Katie Fritz, Kate Ivanovich, Katherine Lee, Katie Luo, Cathy Meng, Katie Van Koevering
For people unfamiliar with common English names, all of the authors have first names similar to or derived from Katherine.
I lay awake at night thinking about the baby naming problem.
I want my child to have a name in the sweet spot. Not too common, not too unique, and, crucially, not a name that is popular for only a brief period so that everyone will know about how old they are just by their given name[0].
But people thinking along these lines inevitably gravitate to the same small handful of names, causing the "too popular for a brief period of time" effect against their will. I've already failed once; my cat is named Olivia, the popular girl's name of the decade, apparently.
[0] My own name is one of those. It's annoying.
I was never going to have kids, but if I did, I had rules for naming.
1. Name them what you're going to call them. If you want a "Kate", don't name them "Katherine". If you want a "Sam", don't name them Samuel.
2. Don't give them the same first name as a close relative.
3. Don't give them a unique spelling of a common name. You're just giving them a life-long annoyance of having to spell their name out any time they're telling someone their name vocally.
My parents broke the first two rules when they named me and it created headaches as I transitioned into adulthood. It even caused problems when I interned at Intel, where he'd been working for 15 years. I got e-mails that were supposed to go to him, and vice-versa.
Yes to 2, BIG yes to 3, a “special” spelling is a curse, why do that to your kid?
I do prefer full versions for the name instead of shortenings or nicknames. I think it lets them feel freer, earlier, to switch to the full version if they like it better than the nickname or shortened version. More options.
yes to 3, a “special” spelling is a curse, why do that to your kid?
Because American parents these days are a bunch of narcissists.
2. Don't give them the same first name as a close relative.
My parents wanted to name me after my grandparents but they solved this nicely.
My first name is the middle name of one of my grandparents, and my middle name is the first name of another grandparent.
One of my kids’ middle name is my grandmother’s first name. The other’s first name is my great-grandmother’s first name (which is also my mother’s middle name).
I’m glad my parents didn’t follow rule 1. They wanted to call me Kathy. It took me until grad school to convince everyone in my life that I was Katherine and absolutely not a Kathy, tyvm. If I’d had to run it by a judge, I’d have been pretty unhappy. As it was, I was grateful they gave me a classic name with lots of nickname options. (Too bad I didn’t know about the paper in time to join in.)
Why not let your child be a product of their times? Whatever name you pick it isn’t like your great grandchildren will think you picked a cool, relevant name for their grandmother.
Are you implying we should name the kids via some BabyLLM? /joking
Because I personally find my name being a product of its time annoying, I think it's reasonable to suspect that someone else would also find that annoying.
Especially given that the hypothetical person in question would get half their DNA from me and be raised by me it seems a pretty reasonable suspicion.
My suggestion is to hit up the Social Security Administration website: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/. Go back a century (or to some era of choice), walk the list, find one that you like that isn't even in the top X these days and you'll be fairly safe. You'll end up with a reasonable, not-ridiculously-unique name that this generation mostly doesn't have (the site has recent years and names don't usually go from unlisted to popular overnight).
the popular girl's name of the decade, apparently.
Keep in mind, in the internet era it can actually be nice to have a bad-SEO common name (though that's often dependent upon surname too).
Most of those names no longer in use will be strongly associated with the particular historical period, usually not what you want
I’m a bit partial to “Ellie” after one of the characters in my favorite game: Last of Us
My mother chose my first name (three characters) specifically to avoid it being turned into a nickname.
This worked so well she later chose a completely unrelated nickname for me.
I did great people in history, this way my children are cursed with high expectations.
May I recommend https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com ?
Despite the name it has a pretty large category of real world names. :)
I am being completely sincere. There are thousands of lists of baby names. Classic information overload. A randomizer let you look at ten options and if you don't like those you can get another ten.
I like having a name like you describe. It's former popularity makes it a familiar name but I've only met a couple of other people with the same first name. Interestingly combined with my similar popularity last name there are on the order of 30 people with matching first and last names in the US.
I think wait but why really nailed the theory of baby naming - https://waitbutwhy.com/2013/12/how-to-name-baby.html
I think it is a misconception that some baby name is boring.
Nothing is less boring than a name embraced by a small energetic human confident that's who they are.
I imagine you might want a funky name for a toy to convinve yourself - that is a total non-issue for children.
Yeah I chose “boring” names for my kids.
I do think the best names are ones with the most meaning.
You name a kid Isaac, you could be naming him after Isaac Newton. It puts something on to him.
If you name a kid William, maybe you hope he will be the next Shakespeare.
Simply by naming someone something, you imprint something on to them. The history and power of a culture.
Yet for this very reason, especially when people see the culture as dark, they choose unique names, names that say you can be who you want to be.
Though I think I still prefer old names, looking at names of people who have done something, and then hoping to do something similar.
I think this is kind of why a convert to an orthodox Christianity, from some heterodoxy, or atheism, or from the religion of the “infadels” takes a new name in baptism. They hope to live up to whomever. If you take the name Theresa at baptism with a sense of obligation to love the lowly like Mother Theresa and so on.
Wonder if other religions do similar things?
I named my kid Dexter. Despite my best efforts he won't wear lab coats or speak with an accent. When I try he just asks me to go buy some plastic drop cloths and goes back to sharpening the kitchen knives.
You always have to name the sister first, otherwise it’s a Schroedinger’s Dexter that never turns out the way you expected.
You name a kid Isaac, you could be naming him after Isaac Newton. It puts something on to him.
My son's name. I was thinking of Isaac Asimov and I had Isaac Newton in mind as well. I know an SF writer who I worked with who named his sons Arthur and Robert, after famous SF writers obviously in his case.
Everyone else is thinking you named your kid after the first guy to get circumcised, whose father Abraham almost sacrificed him
From Freakonomics: [0]
LEVITT: Yeah, one of the most predictable patterns when it comes to names is that almost every name that becomes popular starts out as a high-class name or a high-education name. So in these California data we had we could see the education level of the parents. And even the names that eventually become the, quote, “trashiest” kinds of names, so the Tiffanys and the Brittanys, and I’ll probably get myself in trouble, and the Caitlyns and things like that start at the top of the income distribution, and over the course of 20 or 30 or 40 years they migrate their way down, becoming more and more popular among the less-educated set.
What you see with Mabel in the paper is a fad name coming back. Hipsters bring it back, then upper class parents with hipster pretentions popularize it, then it spreads to the general population. The trick is to pick a name that sounds outdated or obscure but will come into popularity within the child's lifetime. If you wanted to do that now, you would pick something like Linda or Iris.
I would also be interested to see analysis on syllable counts. When will the boomer 2 syllable names will come back into style?
[0] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/how-much-does-your-name-mat...
I worked with a Harrison (born in the 70s) who commented that the name had a bathtub curve - most people with the name were either really old or really young (he knew more Harrisons in his toddler's preschool class than his own age).
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Harrison&assumption=%7B...
Compare with a name like Michael ( https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=Michael ), which while it has fallen out of favor with newer names, is still the most common male name in the population - though the average age is 48 years.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1970s.html
And yes, I went to school with seven Jennifers on that bus route (there were more on other bus routes). https://youtu.be/1nN_5kkYR6k
My first thought is that children born in the 70s named "Harrison" owe their names to Harrison Ford, at that time wildly popular for Star Wars and Indiana Jones. "Mabel" may owe some popularity thanks to Selena Gomez's character in "Only Murders In The Building."
This Harrison was early 70s rather than late 70s, though Harrison Ford was still a known name back then.
Still, Harrison wasn't even in the top 200 names in the 70s. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names1970s.html
Compare with 136 in the 2010s. https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/decades/names2010s.html
One of the things to take note of between those two charts is that the most popular names are less popular. Parents are choosing distinctive names rather than common names.
In 1970, the top five male names represent 2.5 million births. Michael (the most common name) was 707,377 of them.
In 2010, the most common name was Noah with 183,258 births. In 1970, a name with that much popularity would be #20.5 between Thomas and Timmothy.
That 2.5 million again... in 2010s that's 19 names.
... Another visualization of the data. https://namerology.com/baby-name-grapher/ This looks at the top 200 names for boys and girls over time. However, the downward slope isn't fewer overall births but rather the reduction of popularity of the most common names.
And another visualization of the data - The Evolution of US Boy Names: Bubbled https://youtu.be/WQv99sEPDsw and Girl Names: https://youtu.be/qVh2Qw5KSFg
The thing to watch in those is the size of the largest bubbles. The 2014 bubbles look fundamentally different than the 1974 bubbles.
I've always found it somewhat amusing that, at least for my age range, I have a given name that's not unique or obviously weird but pretty uncommon. At the last place I worked, that was guaranteed to--on the odd conference call--have one of the two of us sharing a given name periodically be "Why the hell is someone asking me about $THING_I_KNOW_NOTHING_ABOUT ?" While both my first and last names are northern European, they are also from different countries so as far as I know I'm unique among living people with an Internet presence which is presumably better than sharing a name with someone who is widely hated for some reason or other.
In case anyone else was wondering, no, it isn't _why https://viewsourcecode.org/why/
Through making several Extremely Reasonable Assumptions (namely, that parents are myopic, perfectly knowledgeable agents who pick a name based solely on its “uniqueness”)
What a weird assumption. We named our daughter picking four names, starting respectively with the letters 'G', 'A', 'T' and 'C'.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing - as a 1st time new parent you're famously not well plugged into the names currently being chosen by other parents, which is why our son Max was one of 3 in his class
I definitely looked up what names people were naming their kids when choosing my kid's name. It allowed me to pick one that was not so unusual as to be seen as weird, but wasn't going to clash with everybody else out there either. It worked. He occasionally meets others with his name, but not very often. The only issue is that his name has about five different common spellings.
My name is Michael and I definitely used this data because I didn't want my kids to have very common names. As it turns out, the first person to compile this data in the US was an actuary for the Social Security Administration, also named Michael, who was trying to name his kid and wanted to know what the most common names were so that his kids wouldn't have names that were too common: https://nameberry.com/blog/most-popular-names-how-the-list-w...
I believe the authors, Katy Blumer, Kate Donahue, Katie Fritz, Kate Ivanovich, Katherine Lee, Katie Luo, Cathy Meng, Katie Van Koevering,
may have had a similar experience to your son.
As a currently (but ideally not permanently so) childless adult...what does it matter what the other parents are naming their babies?
btw and fwiw, Max is a good name.
I have only now realised the reason my name is fairly unique.
My father was a teacher, so he did know names people were using, and for any given name could probably think of a child he wouldn't want me to share a name with!
You do realize they are just having fun in that paper, right?
I think this person is also having fun - suggesting they would name their kids by following a genetic sequence
But sticking to the familiar crowd-pleasing members of that sequence to make the joke stick, knowing that even on this site working in poor neglected uracil would be trying too hard
All my homies hate uracil
It's dry humor. The article is soaked in it.
Did you name her Adenine?
I was going to name my child Seven, Mickey Mantle's number, a great name for a boy or a girl. Then some friends overheard it and stole it for their baby.
youre doing a seinfeld bit right?
season 7 ep 13
Took you two whole minutes, I'll have to pick something more obscure next time.
This is kind of depressing: every time I make a somewhat-obscure sci-fi reference here, usually no one gets it (or it takes a very long time). But an obscure Seinfeld reference gets a full citation in 2 minutes.
Nothing Seinfeld is obscure.
Exactly. And if you don't say seven in the emphatic manner George says it who are you.
If it helps, my first thought was Seven of Nine[1].
In my whole life I was able to watch 20 minutes of Seinfeld. I feel that i must be an exceedingly weird person to find it absurdly boring and depressing when almost everyone loves it.
My first thought was the Voyager character called "Seven" (or Seven of Nine) played by Teri Ryan.
"Seven, Mickey Mantle's number, a great name for a boy or a girl" you get over here right now, ya hear?!
The idiot child from "Married with Children" who was eventually abandoned on a street corner when they got tired of him?
35 years ago I knocked up my soon to be wife. We picked out name and opted for a home birth, confident that no other couples had made those same choices.
That birth month, Life magazine featured a full page spread of a home birth (ewwww); their newborn had the same name.
This event is on a list of stuff I/we came to on our own, at the same time as everyone else.
> This event is on a list of stuff I/we came to on our own, at the same time as everyone else.
I'm finding that phenomenon to be rather common. Seems like a bunch of other people are reaching the same conclusion...
Most of us like to believe that we're not slaves to fashion but we often are.
One of my favorite examples (although there are many) is inline skating/rollerblading. It was all the rage in the early 90s or so. It's rare to see someone rollerblading today. I pick that example because it was somewhat related to tech that it took off. But there's no good reason for it to have pretty much died off.
and this callout is funny because it's actually re-emerging as a popular hobby. so there is probably some subconscious influence that led you to call it out here.
I haven't seen it much but I think it's a lot of fun and still have my gear in the garage.
The amusing part about inline skating is that when you go by kids they're look "wow look at that guy skating". And then they never skate themselves.
I suspect there's a few issues
- If your parents don't skate you'll probably never get competent at it
- You need to be actually good to not injure yourself or on a pretty flat area. Rollerblades do not handle holes in pavement nearly as well as bicycles or shoes.
- Bicycles have actual utility like getting to work/places. For Covid a ton of people bought skates [1] but honestly I never saw that many more people skating then compared to before/after.
- They're pretty bulky. A Bicycle can transport and lock itself up but if you skate somewhere you'll need a bag to store them.
[1]: https://www.espn.com/nhl/story/_/id/29078390/rollerblade-ren...
I played ice hockey through college and beyond so rollerblading was pretty straightforward modulo rough surfaces and pavement that isn't flat. But I sort of agree. Even though it was popular at one point, it's something that has a learning curve for someone who hasn't, often painfully, learned activities that provide an on-ramp. Not that I became an expert but picking up inline skating as an adult was pretty easy for me.
And, yeah, it isn't an activity that has any real utility. I don't really bike (didn't learn as a kid because didn't have a real place to safely bike--narrow country roads). But might have done so if there was a real practical reason to do so.
Of course, inline skating was a popular activity at one time and it just fell out of fashion.
Had a number of sensible chuckles...
Because this paper was written in 2024, we include an obligatory section involving generative AI and LLMs.
Another ERA is the Mayfly Parenthood Assumption, in which all parents perish immediately upon naming their child, which makes the math substantially easier.
It is well-known that parents are always in complete agreement over the name they would prefer to pick for their newborn child.
Also the dinosaur and squid-shaped distribution graphs made me smile.
More graphs need animal motifs.
Danger 5 was simply the best. https://imgur.com/P80uqLB
СЯУ...
(and I appreciate how every so often the subtitles in D5 are off)
We baselessly claim a log-normal makes sense...
I personally loved the semi cropped ChatGPT screen shot in figure 8 that has "Can you write me a paper on the game theory of names".
An Abundance of -K̵a̵t̵h̵e̵r̵i̵n̵e̵s̵- K8s, I hear...
Or the more tragic version: Keighty
KT's
Kubernetes is such a lovely name for a girl.
Submitted on 31 Mar 2024
Almost looks like an April Fools Joke.
The above model contains several Extremely Reasonable Assumptions (ERAs). The first ERA is the very conservative assumption that there is only one gender, with all children and all names adhering to the same gender. Thus any child may be given any name, so long as it exists in the names list1. Another ERA is the Mayfly Parenthood Assumption, in which all parents perish immediately upon naming their child, which makes the math substantially easier.
SIGBOVIK is always close to April's fool's day :)
It was in New Zealand and Australia, it's just the GMT-XX zones are a bit slow to catch on.
Naming can be hard, because names are important.
My wife and I legitimately sat down and came up with a list of 50 names we each liked, and from the 98 we had totaled up, we applied a series of different filters to get to an answer over the span of several weeks.
First we each went through the list, and force removed half of them, each of us taking turns eliminating one at a time.
From the remaining 50 we rated them, and removed anything that scored under a 6 from either of us, or under 15 points total.
Then we had 20 left, that we talked through each fairly extensively. We covered etymology, popularity, age association, popular cultural associations, you name it. After that we each removed 5 more.
Once we were down to the top ten, armed with frankly far too much knowledge about these names at this point, we reranked them individually and tallied up the scores.
Two names stood head and shoulders above the rest, one scoring around a 19 total and the other scoring around a 17. Those became our daughter's first and middle names.
We never intended to have children, ended up with two boys.
The first was named by his mother's choice: First name after her father (a perfectly reasonable "Edward"), the middle name after my dad ("Leonard," which we never call him.)
The second was even more of a surprise than the first, but that meant it was my turn: "Jonathan," after a favorite character from a novel. The middle name was chosen by his big brother, to give a little sense of ownership or participation: "Adam."
A paper by Jinseok Kim, Jenna Kim, and Jinmo Kim: "Effect of Chinese characters on machine learning for Chinese author name disambiguation: A counterfactual evaluation" . Obviously the authors don't have Chinese names but I would imagine personally having names that need disambiguating might spur one's interest in this research area. (And they do mention in the paper that it's also an issue for Korean names.)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/01655515211018...
Yeah, it's interesting how the practice of only listing surnames works well in cultures where people have long and distinct surnames (and often common first names) and is just silly in cultures where surnames are short and common and most of the information content of the name is in the first name.
oh my god this paper is wonderful... had me in tears with laughter note the adorable little dinosaurs!
Sigbovik is full of these... https://www.sigbovik.org/2024/proceedings.pdf
The above model contains several Extremely Reasonable Assumptions (ERAs). [...] Another ERA is the Mayfly Parenthood Assumption, in which all parents perish immediately upon naming their child, which makes the math substantially easier."
This paper is just filled with hilarious quotes.
The three most beautiful names in English: Katherine, Elizabeth, Alexandra. Pure magic.
I knew what we were in for when I read
... we create a model which is not only tractable and clean, but also perfectly captures the real world.
Kudos to the authors for a good sense of humour.
I live in the bay area.
Between, say, 2012 and 2018 there was a wave of “Ronin”.
I still get a chuckle thinking of these soccer dads, watching from the sidelines, wistfully thinking:
My son … The wayward samurai…
Not going to lie the first thing I thought was, "Why is the John Green book on HN??" I mean, cool, but surprising. Then I read the end and it made more sense ha
If papers came with theme music, this would make a good pairing
As a Nick born in the 70's, I thought my world was getting a bit weird as Nick's were poping up everywhere all of a sudden. Then I saw a video on the top ten boy's names from 1880-2020[1] and saw Nicholas pop up in the top ten in 1986, peak at #5 in 1990-1992, and drop off in 2004. I blame Nicholas Cage and Nick Nolte.
feels like an april fools post based on section 2
2 Related works: Surprisingly, no one has ever done any research on naming strategies (so long as you conveniently ignore [4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25] and likely other work).
You can get baby name data for every n>5 name by year from the SSO: https://www.ssa.gov/oact/babynames/limits.html
It's... interesting. More Khaleesis and Gokus than you'd think.
If you combine Katherine, Catherine, Kat, Kate, Caty, Katy, Katie, and Katheryn (there are SO MANY variants, but most of them have never been popular), peak popularity for girls in the U.S. in the last century is in 1986 at only 1.8% of baby girls.
That's less popular than the single name Matthew for boys, or any one of Jessica, Ashley, Amanda, or Jennifer, in that same year. I expected it would be higher: my own sister is one of these, and I had a friend circle in my 20s that included a Katie, a Katherine (who went by Kat), a Caitlin, and a Kathryn.
Source: baby name popularity is one of our favorite test data sets at Row Zero, and we do lots of analyses like this for fun, e.g. https://rowzero.io/blog/baby-names-rise-of-n
Reference [12] suggests that the title of the paper was inspired by a previous work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Abundance_of_Katherines
(Also, the submission date, 31 Mar 2024, suggests that the paper was intended to be published on April Fools Day.)
Like any good Presbyterian, I named my Son after the great Archibald Alexander, the progenitor of Princeton Theological Seminary . Myself, I am named after the great theologian John Calvin.
However, if I have a daughter, I will name her Britney - an anagram for Presbyterians
Some parents try to have their cake and eat it too by altering the spelling or pronunciation of otherwise common names, thus ensuring their child both fits in and is unique.
Cheekiness aside, naming our children has been a fun, stressful, but ultimately rewarding endeavor and this paper was very on point.
In "The Three Most Important Things in Life," Harlan Ellison refers to "the improbably-named Briony Catling."
I think he was onto something. Never heard of either of those names in the real world.
[edit] OK, so I had to check and I was wrong. Must have been one of his other essays. But for the uninitiated, here you go: https://harlanellison.com/iwrite/mostimp.htm
You're welcome ;-)
See also the noted 2014 economics paper that studied the phenomenon of co-authorship of economics papers…
“A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Coauthors”
by Allen C. Goodman (Wayne State University), Joshua Goodman (Harvard), Lucas Goodman (UMD), and Sarena Goodman (the Federal Reserve Board)
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/goodma...
The best bit: They recursively reference the paper to provide proof that too many parents choose the same common names:
Reference 6 is the paper.
Also good...
What are these "obvious reasons"?
The reason was that his first name doesn't satisfy the regex
While that does work for the people listed as author, it does miss Katherine derivative “Kay.”
/^[KC]a(t(h?ie|e|h?y|h?erine)?|y)?$/
Sketch of a more complete solution, excluding shortened forms and very foreign ones. Alternatives are in rough order of frequency.
vowel 0: E, Ye, Je, Ai. Optional and rare; Ai in particular is very rare.
consonant 1: C, K, G, Q. Mandatory; G and Q are rare.
vowel 1: a, aa, ai; optional h or gh. Mandatory. A few shortened forms use i instead.
consonant 2: t, tt, d. Almost mandatory, but a few r-centric variants lack it. There also seem to be a few
vowel 2: a, e. Optional, only valid if consonant 2 exists. In shortened forms, also i, ie, or y; this is the end.
consonant 3: r, l. Optional. Sometimes L starts a new word instead.
vowel 3: i, y, ee, ie, ii, e if no consonant 2, plus several rare vowel sequences. Almost mandatory (assuming consonant 3), but a few rare variants pack the r right next to the n.
consonant 4: n, nn, nh. Optional.
vowel 4: e, a, ey. Optional; ey is rare.
Some languages shove an s, c, x, t, k somewhere too (some of these are probably language-specific diminutives, but a few might be phoneme drift instead) ...
"Kaylee" and its variant "Kayla" should probably not be counted (despite almost fitting the pattern) since that's a compound of "Kay", adding the additional "Leigh" name.
Like the author said... Obvious. :)
What makes you think these are all derivatives of Katherine? Especially names that start with G or Q.
It gets worse - there are some obscure ones. Eg Reina, Kaja, Katarzyna, Aikaterine.
https://nameberry.com/list/16/catherinekatherines-internatio...
Their first name isn’t derived from Katherine. ;)
Kay is derived from Kate. Kate is Derived from Kathy or Katherine.
Nicknames satisfy the transitive property.
Nicknames are the objects, isDerivedFrom is the transitive relation on them.
It goes beyond that. Three of the authors have east-asian last names.
I understand that many people from east asia have a given name in their native language and an english sounding name that they often choose themselves.
If those three authors did chose their english names, then they too fall into the same category of parents who chose a variation of Katherine.
This phenomena also occurs in the transgender community; people put a lot of thought and intention choosing their new names only to wind up surrounded by other people who also landed on the same name, often for similar reasons. There's even a whole subreddit specifically for transfeminine people who are named some variation of Lily: https://www.reddit.com/r/LilyIsTrans/
Are all the trans men still naming themselves Aidan?
Recently I've met more Ashe's than Aidan's
at least they're not a https://old.reddit.com/r/tragedeigh/
If they did indeed pick those names while traveling to the US, possibly as adults, I think they’d actually really interesting cases. They’d be choosing names later than their peers, so they could see how the name game played out for their peers. Of course, they could also be peers of the parents of the other authors.
I’ve also met some folks who had English names that phonetically sounded similar to their original names. I wonder if there’s an east Asian first name that sounds like any of the versions of Katherine.
Anecdotal, of course, but the goal can be quite different for both groups.
English people choosing English baby names often want them to be relatively unique or stand out in some way. At the very least, they don't want them to be _overly_ common.
Manny people I've talked to that have chosen a name after immigrating are kind of aiming for the opposite. They want to fit in. They already feel that they stand out, and generally try and minimize that.
There's also the fact that for some groups, they're choosing the name at a time when they may not be very familiar with English names or culture, and may not have much in the way of local resources they can or feel comfortable with drawing on, so the main indication they have that they haven't chosen some absurd name is "hey, lots of people here are named that".
From my anecdotal experience origin is a big factor: of adults I have known to choose a name for themselves americans overwhelmingly pick unusual or ornamented names, whereas the other group (typically asian, first language has a different set of basic sounds) pick stereotypically common and plain/short names. I don't really know anyones specific thought process on the matter though, maybe I'll have to start asking for curiosities sake.
I hope they did not perish immediately after choosing their names, as assumed in the paper.
Not sure it's still the same scenario with today's far more connected world, but even 20 years ago you could guess with some accuracy that someone was east-Asian from their "English" name being ~50 years out of date, popularity wise.
See also:
A Few Goodmen: Surname-Sharing Economist Authors, by Goodman, Goodman, Goodman, and Goodman https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/joshuagoodman/files/goodma...
(Para)bosons, (para)fermions, quons and other beasts in the menagerie of particle statistics, by O.W. Greenberg, D.M Greenberger, T.V. Greenbergest https://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9306225 [Wally Greenberg told me that T.V. stands for 'the very']
Also note that TFA is a 1 April posting.
On a related note:
C. Limb, R. Limb, C. Limb, D. Limb "Nominative determinism in hospital medicine: Can our surnames influence our choice of career, and even specialty?"
https://publishing.rcseng.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1308/147363515X14...
I personally know a "Doctor Coffin" (coughing & coffin) as well as a Doctor Payne.
In the small rural county where I grew up, the 1/2-time job of county prosecuting attorney was named Lynch. I am not making this up.
This reminds me that I went to nautical school with someone whose last name was Schiff (German for ship) and he said that was exactly the reason he chose to go to sea. Also remember someone a year ahead of us whose name was Dory (a small rowboat).
It's SIGBOVIK, so that's the kind of content you'd expect independent of the date.
Actual research paper about the influence of a name on career and other "major life decisions":
• Why Susie sells seashells by the seashore: implicit egotism and major life decisions (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11999918/)
With follow-ups:
• I sell seashells by the seashore and my name is Jack: comment on Pelham, Mirenberg, and Jones (2002) (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14599244/)
• Assessing the validity of implicit egotism: a reply to Gallucci (2003) (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/14599245/)
I began wondering if “Katerina” (often shortened to “Kat”) was related, the etymology I found here https://www.behindthename.com/name/katherine is interesting.
I expect for a lot of parents naming a baby, the actual etymology is less important than whether the name sounds related/derived.
This is the catch: you're not naming a baby: you're naming a person; they just so happen to be a baby at the beginning when you're enjoying an early appreciation for the mel lif lu ous ness of the name ... but they're going to be an adult the vast majority of their life. Ergo, that ought to be the usage parents plan for, rather than some cute, endearing name "fitting" for an infant (for some definition of fitting).
In most cases where babies get a "cutesy" name, hopefully the parents have the self-awareness to give them the corresponding adult version as their legal name, or at least a reasonable alternative as a middle name— both give the person easier options if they want to change it up during life transitions like entering high school or going away to university.
For example, Gwyneth Paltrow's daughter is Apple Blythe Alison Martin, and she's stuck with it, being Apple Martin professionally— but it's good she had the off-ramp to be the much more conventional Blythe or Alison if she'd wanted it.
I'm talking about 'in vogue' names like Kayley and Riley and Jaden. Do you see the CEO of Big Corp or Fields Medal winner being a _______?
(btw, my son attended the same preschool as Paltrow's kids: just a coincidence worth mentioning.)
I think in the case of female names there’s so much cyclic effect to it that it’s really hard to say. I could just as easily imagine a few decades ago people saying the same thing about Melissa, Jessica, Amanda, Jennifer, Lauren, Ashley, and all the other names that were super trendy for millennial girls.
Now Ashley is 35 and pushing little Kaylee in the pram, or maybe she’s a business executive — either way, our perception has shifted that “Ashley” is now a woman not a girl. Just like how Gertrude, Beatrice, and Florence are more likely to be playing dolls at the park than bridge at the nursing home.
A few years ago there was KatieConf. Intended to highlight the lack of Women speakers at tech conferences
https://2019.katieconf.xyz/
I'm reminded of the 'Tom Formal' that took place whilst I was at university:
https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/3192
I saw an ad once for a convention of Bobs, with a keynote speech from Bob Newhart and the Jamaican bobsled team as special guests.
Hah this reminds me of a site I built for April 1, 2019 http://www.mynamecon.com
Is it paradoxical that family names (used by a group of people) are more differentiated than personal names (used by one person)?
I think that makes sense both from an organizational and cultural perspective. Context usually supplies whatever information is needed for personal names so less disambiguation is required, and they are used much more so some simplicity is useful/natural consequence of human nature. Family names are used less frequently and with less context and frankly is how people distinguish their group from others. So yeah, think it checks out.
Whether family names are more differentiated depends on where you live.
The USA has a wide variety, but there are also places like Vietnam where only a handful of family names are in common use and more than 30% of people are Nguyens.
I'd assume that this is more likely true in countries mostly populated by recent immigrants.
Glad to know I am not the only person to notice this :)
I wonder how all of these people met and decided to collaborate on this paper.
I think that is the meta-joke.
The title of the paper is also a reference to the famous YA novel "An Abundance of Katherines" by John Green.
"we create a model which is not only tractable and clean, but also perfectly captures the real world. We then extend our investigation with numerical experiments, as well as analysis of large language model tools."
ie ... this is bollocks.