What's in a name?

In the way that viral nonsense always goes, every few months I see a resurgence of a post (actually a collection of similar posts) which takes your first name and purports to tell you what its "deep meaning" is.  And of course, you're always told that your particular name means something like "Joyful Soul" or "Beautiful Dreamer" or "Fierce Warrior."

It shouldn't require my pointing out that almost all of these alleged meanings are wrong.  The Deep Meaning Generator doesn't give a flying rat's ass what your actual name is; it simply takes it and randomly assigns one of a list of pre-programmed positive-sounding results that are intended to make you think, "Yes... that's me!  Courageous Friend!  I knew it!"

Most western European first names are considerably more prosaic than that.  A few do have origins that sound like they could come from the Deep Meaning Generator; Reginald, for example, means "powerful ruler," which is kind of funny because these days Reginald is not generally thought of as being the most manly name in the world.  (My apologies to any Reginalds in the studio audience.)

A few of the oldest names in the European tradition go back to Hebrew.  A lot of names containing el or elle come from the Hebrew El, meaning "god."  Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Elijah, Elias, and Elizabeth (and the various names derivative from those) mean, respectively, "God's gift," "God's strength," "God's healing," "Yahweh is God," "God is Lord," and "God's promise."  Other names originating in Hebrew are John/Jonathan ("God's grace"), Joseph ("Yahweh shall add"), and Mary/Maria//Mara/Miriam ("bitterness").

A lot of the harsh-sounding old Germanic names have gone out of vogue, and some of those did have meanings that come across as wishful thinking on the part of the parents.  For example, the bert part in Albert, Herbert, Bertram, Gilbert, Bertrand, Bertha, and Robert comes from a Proto-Germanic root meaning "bright" or "brilliant."  But there are plenty of first names that have meanings that are simply weird.

Cecil/Cecile/Cecilia means "blind."  Emile/Emily/Emilia means "rival."  "Courtney" means "short nose."  Leah means "weary."  Calvin means "bald."  Tristan means "outcry."  Rebecca means "bound" or "tied."  Bailey means "manager."  Deborah and Melissa both mean "bee" -- in Hebrew and Greek, respectively.  Cameron means "crooked nose." 

And my own name, Gordon?  Gaelic for "hill dweller."  Oddly appropriate, since just about all of my ancestors were Scottish and French peasants.

But the reason I chose to write about this goes beyond looking at some strange linguistic origins, as fun as that is.  What I'm more curious about is why those Deep Meaning Generators are so damn popular.  Do people actually believe that what they're saying is true, despite the fact that you can find the (actual) linguistic origin of your own name with a fifteen-second Google search?

Or do they know it's not real, and don't care?

I honestly suspect it's the latter, because the one time I went against my better judgment and did the "Well, actually..." thing -- I hardly ever do that, because (1) arguing online is the very pinnacle of pointlessness, and (2) it's fucking obnoxious at the best of times -- I got a response of, "I don't care if it's true, it's fun to believe it."

Which I find utterly baffling.  I don't get any satisfaction at all out of telling everyone that Gordon means "Blissful Spirit" when I know it doesn't.  Plus, the bigger concern here is one that I've addressed before, in the context of the "What's the harm?" objection to believing in stuff like astrology and Tarot divination; putting aside your critical thinking facilities in one setting makes it that much easier to put them aside in more important settings, like your health.

I get that rational thinking is hard, and that the harsh reality of evidence-based understanding can be problematic when it comes into conflict with our dearly-held beliefs or desires.  But unfortunately, credulity is a habit, and one we have to work hard against, even when it seems harmless.

So those are my thoughts for this morning.  Sorry if it makes me seem like a humorless curmudgeon.  Hopefully regular readers of Skeptophilia will know I'm not humorless; as far as the "curmudgeon" part, my wife would be happy to discuss that with you at length.  But anyhow, as a linguist and someone who is dedicated to pursuing the truth, I'd really appreciate it if you'd stop reposting the fake Deep Meaning Generator things.  Because I'm tired of seeing stuff like people claiming that Wanda means "Heart of Gold" when it actually means "sheep herder."

Thank you.

****************************************

Steve, Steve, Jennifer, and Onesimus

I remember running into the idea of changing trends in name popularity when I saw a New Yorker comic back in the seventies.  It showed a typical first grade class photo, including the teacher, and the caption said, "Top row: Steve, Steve, Jennifer, Jennifer, Steve.  Middle row: Jennifer, Steve, Jennifer, Steve, and Steve.  Bottom row: Jennifer, Jennifer, Steve, Steve, Jennifer, and Mrs. Bertha Q. Wackenhorst."

Interestingly, as that particular trend goes, during my last ten years of teaching, I had only a handful of Jennifers in my classes, and barely any Steves.  But I bumped into a more recent iteration of the same phenomenon with a photo of five handsome, affluent-looking white college guys, all smiles and tans and perfect hair.  The caption read, "Left to right: Hayden, Trayden, Kayden, Grayden, and Brayden."

In my own case, I was named after my father, but he was named by his mom, who allegedly said -- and having known her well, I can easily hear her saying it -- "He may be stuck with a French last name, but he damn sure is going to have a Scottish first name!"  Which is how I ended up with an odd amalgam that is still strangely fitting of my actual roots.

Things get even more complicated when you start throwing in other languages.

Names come and go, something that really became apparent when I started doing research into genealogy.  Various relatives and ancestors from my family tree include Ulysse, Anicet, Roxzella, Orsa, Laodice, Odressi, Donathilde, and Hiram.  A friend of mine, for whom I did some genealogical digging, descends from a guy named Onesimus Futch, which sounds like an insult.  ("How dare you, you onesimus futch!")  

My wife's family is largely Eastern European Jewish, and she has Avish, Baruch, Gittel, Scholem, Chaia, Dvora, and Mordechai.  The really weird ones, though, are in my wife's non-Jewish ancestry, which hailed from England and goes back to the Anglo-Norman nobility.  She has an ancestor named, I kid you not, Marmaduke de Thweng.  Another was Johanna Ufflete.  But by far my favorite is Benedicta de Shelving, which would make a great name for the patron saint of interior decorators.

Always keep in mind that however strange your name is, it could be worse.

The topic comes up because of some recent research out of the University of Michigan which looked at naming trends both in children and in pets, and found that it could be modeled using a concept from evolutionary genetics called frequency-dependent selection.  The idea here is that the success of a specific phenotype -- and thus its trending toward becoming more or less common -- depends on how common it already is.  It can go either way; in positive frequency dependence, the trait has better success the more common it is.  (A good example is warning coloration, where a poisonous or venomous species advertises its presence with bright colors; the tactic only works if there are enough dangerous, brightly-colored individuals that predators learn to leave them alone.)  There's also negative frequency dependence, where the success of common phenotypes is poorer.  (An example is apostatic selection in a species of common British garden snails that have a variety of color patterns; studies showed that predators favored the more familiar-looking ones, so rare color patterns had a better survival rate.)

Naming trends tended to show a negative frequency dependence; when names become common, new parents (or new pet owners) tend to choose something more distinctive (or else spell it differently, which is why I had students named Michaela, Mikayla, Mikaela, Makayla, and Mekayla, fortunately not all in the same class).  Names become trendy for a while, but following the time-honored principle of "I want to be unique, just like everyone else," if the trend peaks too high, it goes into an equally precipitous fall.

"This is really a case study showing how boom-bust cycles by themselves can disfavor common types and promote diversity," said study co-author Mitchell Newberry.  "If people are always thirsting after the newest thing, then it's going to create a lot of new things.  Every time a new thing is created, it's promoted, and so more rare things rise to higher frequency and you have more diversity in the population."

Still, something that is too odd never does catch on.  I've seen the name Trasimond in nineteenth century Cajun French records, but I've never known one in real life, and that particular name seems to have always been a bit of an outlier.

You have to admit, though, that it's kind of euphonious.  Better than Onesimus Futch, anyhow, not to mention the unfortunate Mr. Zopittybop-Bop-Bop.  Given those as choices, I'll stick with Gordon.  I might even stick with Marmaduke de Thweng.  At least that one has a certain insouciance.

**************************************

Catcalling

For many years we owned two cats, Puck and Geronimo.

Imagine two soft, gentle, affectionate, fluffy kitties.  Puck and Geronimo were the exact opposite of what you just pictured.

What neither of our cats looked even remotely like.  [Image courtesy of the Creative Commons Nicolas Suzor from Brisbane, Australia, Cute grey kitten, CC BY-SA 2.0]

Puck and Geronimo were siblings, both long-bodied, tough, lean, and solid black.  Puck had some odd features, though.  She had one single white whisker accentuating a face that was already kinda... off.  Her eyes didn't quite line up, so you never could be 100% sure of where she was looking.  She had one broken fang, so her tongue frequently protruded from the side of her mouth.  Plus, her voice sounded like a creaky wheel.  She was actually quite a sweet, affectionate cat, but even dedicated cat lovers had to admit she looked like she had a screw loose.

Geronimo, on the other hand, hated everyone, with two exceptions: (1) my wife; and (2) our dog, Grendel.  When we adopted Grendel, we were assured by the shelter that he was great with cats.  But shelter staff -- no insult intended, they do amazing work -- can sometimes overplay animals' good qualities in the interest of getting them adopted, so when we brought him home, we introduced him to the cats on leash, with me hanging on to my end of it like grim death.  Puck, he ignored completely.  Then he came up and sniffed Geronimo, who sniffed him back (without hissing, which was Geronimo's primary way of communicating with the entire world).  So I tentatively relaxed my end of the lead...

... and Grendel lifted his big front paw and body-slammed Geronimo to the floor.

I leaped forward, yelling, "Noooooooo....!!!!"  But then Grendel started to lick Geronimo's face.  Geronimo, although still pinned to the ground, started purring.  And thus was born the only interspecies gay romance I've ever witnessed.  They were boyfriends for as long as we had them.

But other than those exceptions, Geronimo viewed the entire world with something between haughty disdain and utter loathing.  Sometimes I'd look up from what I was doing to find Geronimo staring at me, his yellow eyes narrowed to slits, and he was clearly thinking, "I am going to disembowel you in your sleep."

What brings all this up is a paper that appeared in Nature last week about some research done at Kyoto University.  A team led by animal behavioral psychologist Saho Takagi did a clever set of experiments to see if cats could not only learn their own names but the names of other cats, and their results suggest that the answer is yes.

They worked with two sets of cats -- household pets, and "café cats."  Apparently in Japan, it's common to have cats living in cafés, for the benefit of patrons who would like to pet cats while they have their coffee and pastries, or at least have cats glaring at them and making harsh judgments about their general appearance.  They had their test subjects "softly restrained" by volunteers, who I hope were wearing body armor at the time, and the cats were given vocal stimuli (the cats' own names, the names of other cats living in the same place, and neutral words falling into neither categories), along with photographs of different cats, sometimes the photograph of the cat being named, sometimes not.

They found that the cats tended to look more quickly and for a longer duration at photographs when the photograph was of the cat being named.  It was evident that the cats tested did indeed know the names of the cats that cohabited with them.  (Except for one test subject who "completed only the first trial before escaping from the room and climbing out of reach.")

I found these data mildly surprising, considering that our own cats gave no evidence of knowing either their own names or each other's.  Geronimo usually responded to being called as follows:

Us:  Geronimo!!!

Geronimo:  Fuck you.

Us:  Geronimo, come get your dinner!

Geronimo:  Fuck you.

Us:  C'mon, kitty kitty kitty!

Geronimo:  Fuck you.

Us: We have a plate of fresh salmon for you!

Geronimo:  Fuck you...  Salmon?  Well, okay, maybe this time.

So I don't know how we'd have been able to tell if he did know his name.

But all of this does point out something I've always thought, which is that a lot of animals are way smarter than we give them credit for.  I know one of our current dogs, Guinness, always gives us this incredibly intent look when we talk to him, as if he's trying his hardest to understand every word we're saying.  Our other dog, Cleo, spends a lot of time ignoring us, but she's a Shiba Inu, which in my opinion is a cat wearing a dog suit.

So okay, maybe that doesn't exactly support the contention that our pets are really smart.  But my point stands.

In any case, that's our cool piece of animal behavior research for today.  If you are the owner of two or more cats, see if you can figure out if they know each other's names.

If any of your cats have a temperament like Geronimo's, you might want to have fresh salmon handy.

**************************************

The name game

This week's Fiction Friday bounces off a question I was asked recently about how I choose names for my characters.  It's an interesting question, and one for which I have no ready answer, which of course won't stop me from burbling on about it for a while.

Most of the time, characters in my stories seem to come with their names pre-assigned.  I know that's not literally true -- but that's what it feels like.  One of the main characters of my work-in-progress, In the Midst of Lions, is named Mary Hansard.  Why?  Beats me. That's just who she is.  It's hard for me to imagine Mary with any other name.

As a brief aside, Mary Hansard is also one of those odd instances when a character kind of waltzes in from offstage and more or less takes over.  She wasn't in my first outlining of the story; but when some of the other characters are walking through a park and run into her, she tells them, "I've been waiting for you."  Why?  Who is she, and how did she know that the others -- who at the point are complete strangers -- would be there?  I was as taken aback by her sudden appearance as (I hope) my readers will be.  I honestly don't know where she came from, but she's turned into one of my favorite characters ever.

Sometimes writing seems more like "channeling" than it does like "inventing."

In any case, back to names.  I think they're pretty critical.  There's no way that the antagonist of C. S. Lewis' The Voyage of the Dawn Treader could have been quite as weaselly as he was had he not been named Eustace Clarence Scrubb.  Interesting, though, that when his character "reformed" -- and you may recall that he was the protagonist of The Silver Chair, and did quite a commendable job as the good guy -- they started calling him "Scrubb" instead of "Eustace."  "Scrubb," while not a last name I would choose, sounds kind of gruff and hale-fellow-well-met, as opposed to "Eustace," which it's hard to say without whining.  (My apologies to any Eustaces in the studio audience.)

I have only once that I recall completely changed a character's name mid-stream -- in my mytho-fantasy novel The Fifth Day.  The antagonist, who might be one of the most intense, tough-minded hard-asses I've ever written, started out as Tim Spillman.  My writing partner, the wonderful Cly Boehs -- with whom I've been meeting weekly for critique sessions for almost twenty years, and whose judgment I trust implicitly -- said the name just didn't work for the character.  It was too genteel.  And she was right.  Tim Spillman became Jackson Royce, and only when he had that name did he really take off as a character, hard-ass-wise.

Naming conventions in different genres can sometimes engender unintentional humor.  Character names in space-epic type science fiction often contain unpronounceable combinations of consonants, and usually involve apostrophes.  "Ah, my arch-enemy, G'filte of M'nshvitz Five!  It is I, your nemesis, Sh'l'mil of Oy'g'valt!"  Sword-and-sorcery fantasy novels usually rely more on accents, and quasi-Celtic sounding names:  "And then, Lünàavórne drew out the Sacred Sword Gínsü and raised it aloft, praying to Alávúnìël, the God of Random Diacritical Marks."

This cover is not my creation, but I wish it was.  It's from a cover-parody Twitter account called Paperback Paradise who you all must follow immediately.

And then there's romance novels, in which the guys usually have strong names with blatant sexual overtones, such as "Dirk Hardbody," and the women have names that sound like they came from the torrid dreams of a horny seventeenth-century English teenager.  A former member of a writers' group I belonged to was writing a contemporary romance about a perfectly ordinary (although of course drop-dead beautiful) American woman, and the main character was named -- I am not making this up -- "Royalle de Tremontaine."

Which brings up one of the funniest riffs Mystery Science Theater 3000 ever did -- "The Many Names of David Ryder," from the episode "Space Mutiny."  Do not, I repeat, do not try to drink anything while watching this.  You have been warned.

So, you can see that you can go a little off the deep end, character-name-wise.  I tend to keep it simple, unless I'm deliberately shooting for humorous effect.  It helps that I spent 32 years as a teacher, and each year I had about a hundred new sources for names.  (And if you take a look at some of the names of the villains in my novels, it might narrow down the guesses as to which students I disliked the most... heh-heh-heh.)

In any case, this is probably not much help, if you're a writer struggling with name choices.  So here are a few more down-to-earth recommendations:

• Think about what your character's personality is like, and choose accordingly.  First impressions in novels are often formed on the basis of the character's name.  If that name then is at odds with who the character is, like with Tim Spillman/Jackson Royce, it will ring false through the whole story. The bottom line is that readers will respond differently to a Ryan than they will to an Elmer -- as unfair as that may seem to the Elmers of the world.
• Don't go overboard, even if you're writing genre fiction.  The point is to keep your readers immersed in your story, not to have them read the name and snicker -- if that happens, they've been jerked out of the world you're trying to create.  Follow the conventions of the genre, but don't overstep the line, or you'll end up in inadvertent self-parody.
• That said, make your names memorable.  You want people to think about your characters even when they're not reading your book.  Consider some of the most-recognized character names out there -- Bilbo Baggins, Ebenezer Scrooge, Scarlett O'Hara, Dr. River Song, Hercule Poirot, Elinor Dashwood, Jean-Luc Picard, Inigo Montoya, Atticus Finch, Sherlock Holmes, Luke Skywalker... each one of those has something a little different about it that makes it stand out, but is not so odd that it seems ridiculous.  (Contrast that to the protagonist of one of my all-time favorite books, Ursula LeGuin's The Lathe of Heaven.  His name is George Orr, but that is such an unmemorable name that despite having read the book several times, I had to look it up just now because I couldn't remember it.)

So give it some thought.  Think about people you know, look in telephone directories and baby name books, and be creative.  Your characters deserve to have names that match their personalities -- don't underestimate the power that a wonderful, or abysmal, name choice will have on your readers' impressions of your story.

*********************************

My friends know, as do regular readers of Skeptophilia, that I have a tendency toward swearing.

My prim and proper mom tried for years -- decades, really -- to break me of the habit.  "Bad language indicates you don't have the vocabulary to express yourself properly," she used to tell me.  But after many years, I finally came to the conclusion that there was nothing amiss with my vocabulary.  I simply found that in the right context, a pungent turn of phrase was entirely called for.

It can get away with you, of course, just like any habit.  I recall when I was in graduate school at the University of Washington in the 1980s that my fellow students were some of the hardest-drinking, hardest-partying, hardest-swearing people I've ever known.  (There was nothing wrong with their vocabularies, either.)  I came to find, though, that if every sentence is punctuated by a swear word, they lose their power, becoming no more than a less-appropriate version of "umm" and "uhh" and "like."

Anyhow, for those of you who are also fond of peppering your speech with spicy words, I have a book for you.  Science writer Emma Byrne has written a book called Swearing Is Good for You: The Amazing Science of Bad Language.  In it, you'll read about honest scientific studies that have shown that swearing decreases stress and improves pain tolerance -- and about fall-out-of-your-chair hilarious anecdotes like the chimpanzee who uses American Sign Language to swear at her keeper.

I guess our penchant for the ribald goes back a ways.

It's funny, thought-provoking, and will provide you with good ammunition the next time someone throws "swearing is an indication of low intelligence" at you.  

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Steve, Steve, Jennifer, and Onesimus

Do you think I look like a "Gordon?"

According to some recent research, I might not have at birth, but I sure do now.  A study, conducted by Yonat Zwebner (which name I am not making up), Nir Rosenfeld, and Ruth Mayo of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Anne-Laure Sellier of HEC Paris, and Jacob Goldenberg of Columbia University, found that the old idea that people are named to match their facial features may actually work in reverse -- the name they're given might actually influence their features.

The paper, "We Look Like Our Names: The Manifestation of Name Stereotypes in Facial Appearance," released a few months ago in the journal Attitude and Social Cognition, found a peculiar pattern when they looked at matching names with faces; a person's name apparently subtly alters such malleable traits such as hairstyle, style of glasses, and resting facial expression.  The authors write:

Research demonstrates that facial appearance affects social perceptions.  The current research investigates the reverse possibility: Can social perceptions influence facial appearance?  We examine a social tag that is associated with us early in life—our given name.  The hypothesis is that name stereotypes can be manifested in facial appearance, producing a face-name matching effect, whereby both a social perceiver and a computer are able to accurately match a person’s name to his or her face.  In 8 studies we demonstrate the existence of this effect, as participants examining an unfamiliar face accurately select the person’s true name from a list of several names, significantly above chance level.  We replicate the effect in 2 countries and find that it extends beyond the limits of socioeconomic cues.  We also find the effect using a computer-based paradigm and 94,000 faces.  In our exploration of the underlying mechanism, we show that existing name stereotypes produce the effect, as its occurrence is culture-dependent.  A self-fulfilling prophecy seems to be at work, as initial evidence shows that facial appearance regions that are controlled by the individual (e.g., hairstyle) are sufficient to produce the effect, and socially using one’s given name is necessary to generate the effect.  Together, these studies suggest that facial appearance represents social expectations of how a person with a specific name should look.  In this way a social tag may influence one’s facial appearance.

Which is interesting in and of itself, but it makes me wonder about how this might be reflected in the changing of naming patterns over time, not to mention the other factors that drive name choice -- such as the fact that some names "run in the family."

I can say from experience that it's hard to decide on a name, which probably explains the plethora of baby name books out there on the market.  Parents want something that will be a source of pride for the child, and will give the child a sense of identity.  (Except, apparently, in my own parents' case, as I was named after my dad, something for which I still haven't forgiven them.)  But sometimes, in that search for uniqueness, parents land on a name that falls into the "It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time" department.

Which probably explains why a recent study of 3000 parents in Britain revealed the startling finding that twenty percent of parents regret the name they chose for their children.

His name is Oliver, but you probably already knew that.  [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Even more common names sometimes have their downsides, suggests another study, done back in 2010 by David Figlio of Northwestern University.  Figlio and his team first did phonemic studies of thousands of names, to sort them into "masculine sounding" and "feminine sounding" names.  They then looked at data from schools, and came up with the amazing trend that boys given feminine-sounding names (e.g. Ashley, Shannon) were significantly more likely to cause discipline problems, and girls given masculine-sounding names (e.g. Madison, Morgan) were far less likely to choose academically rigorous courses of study.

Are names destiny?  There certainly have been general shifts in naming patterns; what is popular with one generation is out in the next, which is why some names end up sounding "old fashioned."  I recall a comic strip from the 1970s, depicting the typical group photo shot of a first grade class, the teacher sitting primly at the end of the first row.  The caption read: "Top Row: Steve, Steve, Jennifer, Steve, Jennifer, Jennifer, Steve.  Middle Row: Jennifer, Jennifer, Steve, Jennifer, Steve, Steve, Steve.  Bottom Row: Jennifer, Steve, Jennifer, Jennifer, Steve, Jennifer, Steve, and Mrs. Bertha Q. Wackenhorst."

This one struck a special note for me.  My grandmother's given name was Bertha Viola, and amongst her siblings were Roxzella Vandell, Orsa Osburne, Flossie Doris, Fanny Elinore, and Clarence Arnold.  Thank heaven their last name was Scott; with an odd-sounding last name, any of those combinations would have been unfortunate indeed.

I find it interesting to consider why the rather harsh-sounding, mostly Germanic names that were in vogue in the late 19th century are mostly gone.  These days you see few, if any, children named Hilda, Ethel, Edgar, Harold, Arthur, Gertrude, Archibald, and so on.  These were amongst the most popular names during the last decades of the 1800s and the first of the 1900s, and yet by the 1950s all of them were virtually gone from the baby name books.  Did parents of that era think that giving a child a strong-sounding name would be an asset in their making their way in the world?  If so, that gives us an interesting insight into the worldview of turn-of-the-century America.

Some names make you wonder what the parents were thinking at the time.  The parents of Chanda Lear, should, in my opinion, be kicked.  I also find myself wondering why parents would choose a relatively common name and then spell it strangely.  I suppose the desire is to impart a sense of uniqueness and individuality to the name, but the sheer inconvenience of it would (for me, at least) outweigh any sense of pride in having a name that has a twist in the way it's spelled.  This seems to be more common with girls' names, for some reason.  Naming a child Khrystee, Liane (pronounced like Leanne), or Erykah -- all monikers borne by former students of mine -- just seems to be asking for a lifetime of having your name misspelled.

However, it's not always the given name that results in a cross to bear for the individual, and a humorous effect for the rest of us.  Working for a registrar's office, one of my first jobs after graduating from college, I ran into transcripts for Turki Hasher, Celestina Crapp, Timothy Turnipseed, Carl Tolfree, and James Hollopeter.  Family allegiance notwithstanding, I can't imagine why Cloyd Dick IV wouldn't change his name.

Then, there's the never-to-be-forgotten woman I heard about because when she got married, it made the national news.  Her maiden name was Phoebe P. Peabody.  She married a guy named Paul Beebe, and decided to go with a hyphenated married name, so she became Phoebe P. Peabody-Beebe.  Which to my ears sounds like Morse Code.  I guess even without the hyphen, she'd still have been Phoebe Beebe, so I guess it's commendable that she decided to go big or go home.

As I mentioned earlier, I rather dislike my own first name, but not enough to go through the hassle of changing it.  But just considering what it would be like to go through life as Basile Bastard or Nancy Anne Seancey or Earless Romero (all real names, I swear) makes me unlikely to complain.  And if you think things are bad now, go back in history, and you run into some truly wacky ones.  My wife's ancestry boasts a woman named Albreda de Brumpton.  My own includes a German dude named Poppo von Rot.  My cousin in New Mexico descends from a Georgia plantation owner named Onesimus Futch.  My son thinks this sounds like an insult. ("You... you... onesimus futch, you!!!")  So, it could be worse.

A great deal worse.

Scientific names, Indigo Children, and Alpha Thinkers

Most people are, by nature, categorizers.  We like to put labels on things, sort the world into neat little boxes.  For many of us, this drive is integral to our understanding of the world.

An example from my own field is the concept of species.  The definition seems simple enough: a group of morphologically similar individuals that are capable of interbreeding and producing fertile offspring.  It seems, on the surface, that given this definition, it should be trivial to determine whether two individuals are, or are not, members of the same species.

The problem is, the world is messy, and doesn't often acquiesce to our desire to paste labels on various bits of it.  The word species is actually one of the hardest to pin down definitions in biology.  Ring species, fertile hybrids, morphologically distinct populations that can interbreed, morphologically identical populations that cannot, and so on, all point up that we're trying to draw firm distinctions in a realm where those distinctions probably don't exist.  As my long-ago vertebrate zoology professor once said, "The only reason that humans came up with the concept of 'species' is that Homo sapiens has no near relatives."

It's funny how serious taxonomists get about this, however.  There are fierce arguments over whether species should be "lumped" or "split" (particularly contentious amongst birdwatchers, who often bump up their lists with no hard work if what was once a single species gets divided into two or more).  There are endless arguments even about what names species should be given, and every month taxonomic oversight groups publish lists of name changes, to the chagrin of biologists who then have to go back and alter their records.

The same urge to divide a messy reality into neat compartments pervades a lot of other fields, too, and the results are sometimes more pernicious than the biologist's need to decide whether some plant or another is a new species.  In psychology, for example, it has driven the use of diagnostic labels on groups of behaviors that might not actually be conditions in the clinical sense.  ADD and ADHD, for example, are diagnoses that even the experts can't agree upon -- whether or not they are actual medical conditions, how (or if) cases should be medicated, and inconsistencies in how they are diagnosed have all led to significant controversy.  (There's a nice overview of the arguments here.)

Then, there's the urge to relabel in order to give a previously stigmatized group a more positive spin.  The adoption of the word "gay" to mean "homosexual" in the 20th century was, in part, to find a positive word to identify people who have throughout history been the targets of the worst sorts of epithets.  In the 1990s, a group of atheists tried the same kind of rebranding, and settled on calling themselves "The Brights" -- a move that to many people, including myself, seemed so self-congratulatory as to be cringeworthy.

More recently, there have been two rather interesting examples of this same sort of thing.  One is the idea of "Indigo Children," which is an increasingly popular label given to kids who are "empathetic, sensitive, intelligent, and don't fit in well."  I can understand the difficulties that parents of sensitive children face -- one of my own sons certainly could be described by those words, and he had a hell of a time making it through the teasing and bullying that seem to be an entrenched part of middle school culture.  But labeling these kids, even with a positive term, doesn't help the situation, and might even make it worse if the label makes the child feel even more different and isolated.  Add to that a pseudoscientific twist that you often see on "Indigo Child" websites -- that "Indigo Children" frequently have paranormal abilities -- and you have a fairly ugly combination of a non-evidence-based false diagnosis with a heaping helping of New-Agey condescension.  (For a particularly egregious example of this, go here -- and note that the article begins with a statement that the easiest way to identify "Indigo Children" is that they have "indigo-colored auras.")

Just yesterday, I found another good example of this -- the idea of the "Alpha Thinker."  Eric Schulke, who wrote the article I linked and who works for the "Movement for Indefinite Life Extension," tells us that Alpha Thinkers "... are creatives, innovators, pioneers. They acutely and agilely navigate an abundance of diverse, fallacy aware thinking. The alpha thinker can’t bring themselves to live at the last outpost and not venture further. They cannot resist poking their finger through the realm of subatomic particles. They can’t stay on this side of the atmosphere. They look into biology and the elements. They want to know why we are here, why the universe and all of existence is here, how far it goes, what is out there, what the hell is going on. Alpha thinkers are the universe’s way of creating the devises [sic] needed to help bring out all of the potential in its elements."

Well, that's just fine and dandy, but how do you know if someone is an "Alpha Thinker?"  It turns out that you more or less have to wait for them to do something smart:  "It is not a college degree that signifies the alpha thinker. As the alpha thinker knows, its [sic] an abundance of fallacy-aware thinking that signifies it...  Alpha thinkers control the elements. They are cosmic titans, the leaders of humankind, the explorers of the universe setting sail with fierce urgency."

Spinoza, Newton, and Thomas Paine, we are told, were "Alpha Thinkers," which strikes me as kind of an odd trio to choose, but I guess there's no denying these three men were bright guys.  Then, we are given two curious pieces of information: (1) whether or not you are an "Alpha Thinker" can be determined by an electroencephalogram; and (2) from "historical times" until now the ratio of "Alpha Thinkers" to ordinary folks has increased from 1 in 99 to 1 in 6.

So, I'm thinking: how can you know that's true, given that the EEG machine was only invented in 1924, and most people in the world will never have an EEG done during their lifetimes?  It seems to me that the label "Alpha Thinker" is just a new way to say "smart person," and Schulke is pulling made-up statistics out of his ass in order to support his point that there's something inherently different about them.  Further evidence of this comes at the end of the article, where Schulke gives the whole thing a New Age twist by saying that "Alpha Thinkers" are here to guide us into the next stage, the "Transhuman Revolution."

Oh, and of course, throughout the article Schulke makes it clear that he's an "Alpha Thinker."  As if there were any doubt of that.

So, there you are.  Today's musings about human nature.  I suspect that all of the above really, in the long haul, does minimal damage, with the possible exception of the misdiagnosis of individuals who are actually mentally ill and who don't receive treatment because they are labeled "Indigo Children" or "Alpha Thinkers," or whatever.  But it is a curious tendency, isn't it?  I think I'll wrap this up here, because I need to go update the database of my birdwatching sightings and see if any of the scientific names have changed.