My parents occasionally complained that nobody was named Matthew before I was born, yet afterwards it seemed that nearly every little kid had my name. My parents argued that when I was little that calling my name in a public place to get my attention caused a whole pack of little Matthews to come running. Occasionally there would be several kids with my name in school from year to year. In college, on the track and cross country teams, I think there were five of us at one point. It really hasn’t bothered me that much since a lot of acquaintances call me by my last name, but even this backfired when there was a girl on the team named Keely.
My initial thoughts of Wolfram Alpha are that it just doesn’t have enough data to make interesting results of most search queries, but the name search is interesting. Plugging in my name shows a quick rise and fall of its popularity, peaking right around my birthday. I guess my parents really bought into the Matthew hype. It’s like buying a new car and commenting that suddenly all the cars you see are the exact model you have. There is a chapter of Freakonomics that analyzes the popularity of birth names and how they rise and fall in cycles. They argue that the more well-to-do give birth names to their kids that may sound unusual at first, but then catch on with the general population. Eventually enough people are given the name that it becomes too popular and burns out.
It also reminds me of another analogy I read somewhere: “Why am I always in the longest checkout lane in the grocery store?” These popularity musings are mainly based on a self-centered perspective: every individual claims everyone else is doing the same thing, whether it be car choice, birth name choice, or checkout lane choice. Using a global perspective, it becomes clear why everyone else seems to think the same way. If I were to choose one person at random in the entire world, the odds are that he would be Chinese (again making use of Wolfram Alpha). Do the Chinese wonder why everyone else is Chinese? Using this perspective, think about the grocery checkout lanes: if you had to pick out one person at random in all of the lanes, the odds are that he would be in the lane with the most people. If someone is in a checkout lane, the odds are greater that he is in the longest line in comparison with all the others . This can also be applied to birth names: if a plurality of people are named Matthew, then the odds are that I would be named Matthew over any other name.
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