Thursday, September 08, 2005
The Name Game
As alluded to on the monkey's home page, we are being somewhat less than successful in choosing a name. Being over-educated, hyper-rational, and VERY geeky, we established a thoroughly scientific method for choosing a monkeyname. The methodology involved:
Downloading and reading the Social Security Administrations top 1000 girls names registered in 2003 and 2004.
Deleting all those that were used by strippers, prostitutes, and porn actresses
Deleting all those that reflected brand names (Lexus, Mercedes, Portia)
Eliminating all the mispelled variants (Just how many ways can you spell Mikayla, Shayanne etc?!)
Eliminating names that were essentially made up in the last decade or so (Madison and Uneek anyone?)
Eliminating all the names that are just ridiculously popular now (Gabriella, Isabella, Olivia, Emily etc.)
Eliminating names that are already in the family (too much history, and too many chances for ticking off the one who's name we didn't use. For the same reason we caution our relatives not to suggest names!).
We then ran the remaining 60 or so names through the AMAZING NameVoyager from the Baby Name Wizard to see how their popularity has grown and fallen over the last century. We wanted to avoid names that were only popular in the time of our grandparents & great-grandparents, and also those that are skyrocketing in popularity (we don't want our monkey to have the same name as seven other girls in all her classes).
This got us down to about 40 or so names.
We sought the expert opinion of several of our friends. Each, of course, came back with about 5 names that they absolutely loved! Yet, of course, each of these top-5 lists were completely different.
Alison and I then attempted a modified Delphi technique where we each independently picked our top 10-15 names from our list, and gee whiz if there was virtually no overlap! There were some similarities (I'd pick Claire, she'd pick Clara etc.), but nothing striking.
Our latest attempt is to find a matched pair for first and middle names- something that has a ring, but isn't too alliterative. Interestingly, we ended up with a number of pairs that included names that weren't on ANY of our previous lists!
It's beginning to look like she will be the monkey well into her teens!
Downloading and reading the Social Security Administrations top 1000 girls names registered in 2003 and 2004.
Deleting all those that were used by strippers, prostitutes, and porn actresses
Deleting all those that reflected brand names (Lexus, Mercedes, Portia)
Eliminating all the mispelled variants (Just how many ways can you spell Mikayla, Shayanne etc?!)
Eliminating names that were essentially made up in the last decade or so (Madison and Uneek anyone?)
Eliminating all the names that are just ridiculously popular now (Gabriella, Isabella, Olivia, Emily etc.)
Eliminating names that are already in the family (too much history, and too many chances for ticking off the one who's name we didn't use. For the same reason we caution our relatives not to suggest names!).
We then ran the remaining 60 or so names through the AMAZING NameVoyager from the Baby Name Wizard to see how their popularity has grown and fallen over the last century. We wanted to avoid names that were only popular in the time of our grandparents & great-grandparents, and also those that are skyrocketing in popularity (we don't want our monkey to have the same name as seven other girls in all her classes).
This got us down to about 40 or so names.
We sought the expert opinion of several of our friends. Each, of course, came back with about 5 names that they absolutely loved! Yet, of course, each of these top-5 lists were completely different.
Alison and I then attempted a modified Delphi technique where we each independently picked our top 10-15 names from our list, and gee whiz if there was virtually no overlap! There were some similarities (I'd pick Claire, she'd pick Clara etc.), but nothing striking.
Our latest attempt is to find a matched pair for first and middle names- something that has a ring, but isn't too alliterative. Interestingly, we ended up with a number of pairs that included names that weren't on ANY of our previous lists!
It's beginning to look like she will be the monkey well into her teens!
# posted by Richard @ 9:11 AM 
