December 2, 2010
THERE'S A REASON FOR THE "OJ" (SELF-REFERENCE ALERT):
Baby Names Reveal More About Parents Than Ever Before (Clara Moskowitz, 12/02/10, LiveScience)
A new analysis of name statistics suggests that the meaning conveyed by a baby's name - that is, what a name tells others about the parents' tastes and background - has ramped up significantly over the last 25 years as baby names have become more diverse and numerous."We're in the middle of a naming revolution," said Laura Wattenberg, author of the popular book "The Baby Name Wizard" (Three Rivers Press, 2005) and creator of the website BabyNameWizard.com. "Parents are putting a much higher premium on distinctiveness." [...]
As Wattenberg points out, in the 1950s, the top 25 most common boy's names and the top 50 girl's names accounted for half of babies born. Today, however, those top names are given to fewer babies. In fact, you'd have to include the most popular 134 boy's names and the top 320 girl's names to cover half of all babies born every year. [Most Popular Baby Names in History]
"If you have 10 guesses to get somebody's name today there's almost no chance you'll get it," Wattenberg told LiveScience. "But 100 years ago, if you guessed the top 10 names you'd have a really good chance" of guessing correctly.
But with these changes in naming trends come social implications.
"The more diverse naming styles become, the more we are going to read into somebody's name," Wattenberg said. She analyzed baby name statistics from the U.S. Social Security Administration to calculate a measure called Shannon entropy from the field of information theory. This measure is used to describe the information contained in a message - in this case, how much is communicated by the choice of a name.
The concept of entropy is associated with the disorder and chaos in a system (the second law of thermodynamics states that a closed system will always move toward higher entropy). Shannon entropy describes the relationship between how much disorder or uncertainty is associated with a certain variable, and how much information is stored in a message. The more diverse and uncertain the field of possible messages, the more information the message will contain.
Wattenberg calculated a sharp rise in name entropy over time. She found that this measure of the information carried by names has risen as much in the past 25 years as it did in the full century before that.
We went with:
[Orrin] Griffin--the first born has been named Orrin (Celtic for fair-skinned) since 1816 but, sadly, I mentioned to The Wife that with as many as four of us alive at the same time, when the womenfolk yell, "Orrin!", you just point at each other and say, "they want you." So we had to give ours a middle name that you could refer to him by. In every previous generation we'd gotten outh mother's maiden name for a middle name, but she felt like calling a kid Goldstein would be cruel. We kept the G but went with Griffin. She wouldn't let me make it Grufyyd--from one of my favorite books, but gave in on the Anglicized version.
Avery--our daughter had to have an "A" name because of some dead relative Jewish thing. I hated all the girl names but The Wife finally came up with a name that means "king of the little people."
Archer--the youngest had to be an "A" name too and he got one that implicates the long bow theory of democracy, Robin Hood, William Tell, and Lew Archer.
