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 namе. Every country on earth has ratified thе 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 place 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 centimetre required to break bones.
And as always,
thanks for watching.