Have you ever noticed that some names seem to be very popular and some names seem just downright old and dated. Well, recently I found a tool that lets you chart just how crusty and cobwebbed your name actually is. It's called Wolfram Alpha. Now that's not what the tool is intended to be, but, so far, that's all I can figure out to do with it. Wolfram Alpha is a web site/search engine that was created by Stephen Wolfram, the guy who also developed the mathematical tool "Mathematica". You have to be a freakin' genius to understand how to use any of his tools and Mathematica is kind of expensive if all you want to do is play. Wolfram is a certified genius, having won one of those MacArthur genius awards. But for now, back to names.
One of the things that Alpha can do is look up statistical data on names, real fast. For example, if you type "Philip" into the search engine, you get a lot of stuff on the name "Philip", more than you really wanted to know. Like it's currently 378th in popularity, that 1 in 2681 (0.037%) or 802 people born in the US in 2008, were named "Philip". Also, the average age of a "Philip" is 56. You even get a graph that shows you just how dated your name is.
Pretty bad, huh? But if you feel outdated, you can always try two names for comparison.
"Donna", which used to be a really popular name, no doubt because of Donna Reed, has really fallen out of favor. Lets try another. Here's a graph of me, my wife and two of my many blog followers. As you can see, we're all has-beens. Albert is a real 19th century kind of guy.
For one last example, a friend of mine has a daughter, "Sophia", who turned five yesterday.
And just to see how she compares with the old fogeys.
What's really freaky is just how susceptible to popular culture we are when we name our kids. Try out a few yourself and see what I mean. Till next time.....Merry Christmas!
