Names

Hey, Vsauce. My name is Michael. And my name is Kevin.

Names. Humans give each other names, but so do dolphins. They use whistle sounds and will respond to their whistle name even when produced by a dolphin they don't know. Personal names, personalized things, signifying that the named thing is capable of feeling; that it's worthy of empathy.

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child has declared that every human child born on earth has the right to a name. Every country on earth has ratified the treaty, except for three: South Sudan, the newest country on earth, Somalia, which has no central government, and the United States.

Why? Well, some organizations inside the United States believe that the US shouldn't have to listen to another authority, and the treaty prohibits the death penalty for children. It's a moot point now, but up until 2005, twenty-two states allowed children to be executed for crimes. The United States follows the treaty now, but won't promise to always do so.

Dunce is a bad name to be called, but an even worse name to be the origin of. Meet Duns Scotus, born in 1266. Popular in his time, later scholars looked down on his teachings as clever but wrong. They were so critical, in fact, they took Duns and turned his name into a noun meaning a stupid person - a dunce.

Perhaps you'd rather have had the longest name ever. A record held by a man born in 1904 whose name was 746 letters long. You can listen to someone pronounce the entire name on Wikipedia. What can't a name be? Mononymous people only use one name. You can name your kid Apple or North or Moon Unit. You can name your kid Football. But not everywhere.

Some countries require parents to submit their children's names to the government for approval. New Zealand enforces a policy in which names must not cause offence to a reasonable person, not be unreasonably long, and should not resemble an official title or rank. For example, their courts recently forbid a mother from naming her child "Sex Fruit."

But New Zealand has allowed some unusual names. Right now, in New Zealand, there are children living whose names are officially "Violence," "Midnight Chardonnay," and "Number 16 Bus Shelter." In 1996, a Swedish couple submitted their child's name for official approval, "Albin." But in protest of the naming laws in place at the time, they spelled Albin like this: It wasn't accepted.

In the United States, you can name your kid pretty much anything that doesn't include obscenity, numerals, or symbols, which means, as Carlton Larson points out, you can't name your kid R2-D2. But you could, say, name your child Adolf Hitler, which Heath and Deborah Campbell did in 2006.

Adolf Hitler Campbell made headlines in 2009 after a bakery refused to put his name on a cake for his third birthday. Shortly afterwards, child welfare officials took him and his other controversially named siblings away from their parents and placed them in foster care, where they remain to this day. His parents are self-identified Nazis, and they live in New Jersey, the latter of which makes them New Jerseyans.

If they lived in Kansas, they'd be Kansan; if they lived in New York, they'd be New Yorkers; if they lived in Utah, they'd be Utahns. A name based on where something is from is called a demonym, which means that even names have names. An endonym is a name given to a place by those who live there. An exonym is the name given to a place by those who live elsewhere.

But my favorite name for a name is an autoantonym. A word that can mean the opposite of its other meaning. For example, the word "off," which can mean both activated and de-activated. For instance, the alarm went off, so we had to turn it off.

You can track the distribution of your last name across the entire earth using the public profiler, or visualize the popularity of the US' top 1000 names over time. Studies have shown that your name may influence your behavior.

The name–letter effect is a phenomenon in which people prefer words, events, other people, and places which contain letters similar to the letters inside their own name. Measuring a person's preference for such letters has been shown to be a good gauge of self-esteem.

Richard Wiseman's Quirkology is a great read on this topic. He mentions "alphabetical discrimination." People with last names that begin with the letter near the end of the alphabet tend to rate themselves significantly less successful than people with names that begin with the letter near the beginning of the alphabet.

Perhaps because all their lives they've been put on the bottom of lists. Also fascinating is the fact that men and women with positive initials, like "A.C.E.," "H.U.G.," or "J.O.Y." live 3 to 4.5 years longer than average. But men with negative initials, like "P.I.G.," "B.U.M.," or "D.I.E." die about three years earlier than average.

But interestingly, women with negative initials don't show much difference. Half of all Americans share the same 1,712 last names. 1 percent of Americans have the last name Smith. In China, 85% share the same 100 last names.

Two hundred last names cover 96% of the population in Vietnam, 40% of which have the same last name. This one. Name Colleen can hurt people's feelings. It's at the very bottom of Graham's hierarchy of disagreement.

And, at the end of the day, names are just words. As the saying goes, sticks and stones may break my bones, but words are merely the smallest element of language capable of containing meaning and isolation and, as such, could never directly produce the 4,000 newtons of force per square centimeter required to break bones.

And as always, thanks for watching.