Tag: children’s names

Naming Rights (and wrongs)

A new “study” has found that names count. It’s pretty much the same theory expounded on in detail in Freakonomics – that people with dumb names will be picked on, or come from dumb families – and these environmental factors will cause them to grow up pretty screwed up. The study found that:

“Boys with unpopular, girlish or uncommon names often are ridiculed by peers, come from families of low socioeconomic status and face discrimination in the workforce based on a preconceived bias about their names, according to the study, which analysed more than 15,000 names.”

According to the SMH article the top 10 bad-boy names are:

  1. Alec
  2. Ernest
  3. Garland
  4. Ivan
  5. Kareem
  6. Luke
  7. Malcolm
  8. Preston
  9. Tyrell
  10. Walter