Saturday, November 3, 2007
Chapter 6
The author explained about a story of kids who were named Winner and Loser, which had results which were quite odd. Winner turned out to have a long criminal record, and Loser was Sergeant of the NYPD and is doing well. Maybe Winner was too much for the kid to live up to, because nobody is a winner every time. And for Loser to join the police force was hilarious to me. Temptress was a funny story too, and it goes to show you how parents with low IQ's can end up naming there kids bad names, because they are uneducated and I believe that passes on to the kids. The name comparison experiment was interesting, and then Freyer said that an undereducated, low income, pair of black parent creates “super black” names, and how they seem to do worse in there life. I think that the same thing could happen with the same type of white parents who have low IQ's, creating "super white" names, like Cledus, or Chastity. Is it the reflection of the parents or work of bad name? I believe it is the parents, since they obviously have low IQ's, they will not be able to raise a child in a proper environment, and there genetics will be passed on to the child as well, which includes the low IQ. The story of Deshawn v Jake Williams, where there resumes were sent out to employers, and Jake had a greater amount of replies for interviews than Deshawn. I do believe that there is a racial undertone to the reason why Jake, who has a more "white" name, received more replies for interviews than Deshawn who has a more "black" name. Then there was the genius parents who named there 4 yr old, Yo Xing Heyno Augustus Eisner Alexander Weiser Knuckles Jeremijenko-Conley. How could I forget about the poor child whose name is pronounced, Shuh-TEED, but is spelled Shithead, haha. I believe that the most suitable question that I have for these parents is what were they smoking when they named there kid, was it crack or a hallucinogen? The author then explains how names from high income families climb down the socioeconomic ladder? I think its more random than anything. The author then creates a list of what popular names of kids are going to be in the future. I don’t believe they can guess what the popular names for girls and boys are going to be in 2015, those are a bunch of wild guesses. I think that naming is a process that has a lot of variables and cannot be predicted accurately at all.
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2 comments:
It's very interesting to see that giving a child a name that is too big of a name such as winner may be just as problematic as giving him/her a bad name like looser. The kind of expectation that a name like winner might place on a young child’s shoulder might be overwhelming. The funny thing is certain names are more appropriate for older and more mature people that youngsters, but parents have to name a person as a child. I think parents have to think about how a name is going to serve a child at various stages of his life when deciding on names. Parents shouldn't just choose names for children base on how they sound because a child name can have some impact on his/her psychologically.
I think I disagree with you on the name distribution. I mean, all the evidence that Levitt presents for all the chapters, not just this one, seems pretty reliable. If he were just making this stuff up without any kind of sources or statistics it would be compeletely unbelievable. But then again, correlations can be skewed. In the bonus part of the book it gives the example of, "Socrates died. Cats die. Therefore, Socrates was a cat." I guess everything can be twisted around, but for some reason, I believe the name stuff.
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