Wednesday, June 04, 2014

What's In a Name?

At Ace of Spades, I saw a link showing data whereby you can supposedly tell how old a person is by his or her name. Ha!, I thought to myself. Since my mother was (for the times) much older than the norm when she had her children, I bet the average age of someone with my name is actually about 10 years older than my age. Interestingly enough, both of my sisters' names as well as my own are among the top 25 most common names of those alive as of Jan 1, 2014. And while the median age of those sharing the name Barbara is about 20 years past where I am now, the bottom of the range is indeed about 10 years past my own age. My sisters' median and bottom of range numbers are even lower, and they are both younger than I am. Does this make sense to you? It does to me simply because my parents were in general more old-fashioned than the parents of my friends, so it would make sense that the names that they found attractive would be a bit behind the fashion as well.

There's some interesting data there, if you want to check it out. For example, half of all living Brittanys are between ages 19 and 25. But a certain singer's first album only came out 15 years ago, so I don't see that being the link. Say you were 14 back in 1999, you'd only be 29 now. And I just now wondered if the name information took spelling discrepancies into account. Is Jason/Jaysun/Jayson/J-son the same name? In any case, I'm younger than my name. :)

No comments: