Why Your Name Matters

The former mayor of Reykjavik was told no when he wanted to name his baby daughter Camilla. The problem was the letter C. Iceland bans baby names that start with the letter “C” because it is not in their alphabet.

The countries that ban names say they want to minimize confusion and embarrassment. As a result. Germany prohibited one couple from calling their little one Osama Bin Laden and others from using the surnames Merkel and Kohl. Because New Zealand won’t let a name start with a number, a baby couldn’t be called 4Real.

So yes, nationally, professionally, and personally, names matter.

What Names Mean

Names can give us nudges.

Asked why they chose names that could be offensive or funny, parents say that they want their child to be unique. By contrast, one journalist even suggested that people with popular names are more comfortable feeling ordinary. Less obviously, a name can reflect the balance of power in a multi-ethnic household, Researchers have noted that Arab-French couples with a white collar working mother tend toward French names for their children.

In medicine, a name might dictate a specialty. Through their “light-hearted non-academic” study, several British physicians found doctors with the surname Limb tend to be orthopedic surgeons, a disproportionate number of pediatricians were named Young, and some of the psychiatrists were Drs. Nutt, Bhatti, and Moodie.

Names can reveal consumption patterns.

When conservative parents send their “economic signal,” they use names with harder consonants and/or fewer syllables. Examples include Colt and Conner, and Kyleigh and Addisyn. By contrast, liberal names could include Nina or Julia, and Jacob or Ryan.

Nameberry had a long list of examples:

3. Names connect to jobs.

Several years ago, a group at Verdant Labs said they went through a list of more than two million people. Scouring public records, they connected names to professions and came up with some links. For example, if your name is Richie, it is more likely that you will become a guitarist. Meanwhile, Mikes and Jims tend to be football coaches.

When they connected the names and jobs, the people at Verdant Labs warned us not to assume that a list of football coaches will necessarily have more Mikes and Jims. Instead they discovered that among people named Mike, there was an unusually high percent of coaches.

Here is an excerpt from a Verdant Labs graphic with the names/jobs connections:

Our Bottom Line: Signaling

While I am not sure about the academic rigor for some of the baby naming research, I do believe that many parents say something through their children’s names. They send a signal.

Explained by behavioral economists, signaling can involve a very specific act that conveys a much broader message. A politician votes for the death penalty to show he is tough on crime. Someone shops at Annye’s Organics to demonstrate concern about the environment. And, you name your little boy Odysseus to display your knowledge of Greek mythology as you nudge him in a literary direction.

Perhaps, unhappy with their signaling, the following individuals changed their names:

My sources and more: As a start, Quartz has the perfect essay on what names mean. Leaping to a different perspective, the BBC tells us how nations regulate names. Then, for the academic perspective, this paper came in handy.

Please note that several sentences from today’s post were in a past econlife.