So, What’s In a Name?

by Racialicious Special Correspondent Latoya Peterson

Growing up as a Latoya, I used to be a bit annoyed with people asking me about my name and what it meant. Luckily, I was an 80s Latoya, which means I just had to respond to a lot of lame Jackson family jokes. As I grew older, I met more and more Latoyas, and felt a bit disappointed. My name was no longer unique, depending on the area. When I was a senior in high school, I knew four other Latoyas (and LaToyas) personally, and knew of a few more. At my job now, there was a LaToya working before me, so I am now and forever Latoya P. or LP. These days, my name is fairly normal, so unless I am calling across the pond* I don’t have to deal with much fuss.

Generally, the reception to my name has been pretty positive.** The only person who seems to regret it is my Mom. And while I toyed with the idea of changing my name, it was always to make it something more “cool” and less normal.***

So, I must admit, I was fairly pleased to see a piece in the New York Times backing up what I’ve known all along: People with unique names generally turn out fine. The article “A Boy Names Sue, and a Theory of Names” breaks it down:

During his 1969 concert at San Quentin prison, Johnny Cash proposed a paradigm shift in the field of developmental psychology. He used “A Boy Named Sue” to present two hypotheses:

1. A child with an awful name might grow up to be a relatively normal adult.

2. The parent who inflicted the name does not deserve to be executed.

I immediately welcomed the Boy Named Sue paradigm, although I realized that I might be biased by my middle name (Marion). Cash and his ambiguously named male collaborator, the lyricist Shel Silverstein, could offer only anecdotal evidence against decades of research suggesting that children with weird names were destined for places like San Quentin.

Studies showed that children with odd names got worse grades and were less popular than other classmates in elementary school. In college they were more likely to flunk out or become “psychoneurotic.” Prospective bosses spurned their résumés. They were overrepresented among emotionally disturbed children and psychiatric patients.

[...]

Today, though, the case for Mr. Cash’s theory looks much stronger, and I say this even after learning about Emma Royd and Post Office in a new book, “Bad Baby Names,” by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback.

By scouring census records from 1790 to 1930, Mr. Sherrod and Mr. Rayback discovered Garage Empty, Hysteria Johnson, King Arthur, Infinity Hubbard, Please Cope, Major Slaughter, Helen Troy, several Satans and a host of colleagues to the famed Ima Hogg (including Ima Pigg, Ima Muskrat, Ima Nut and Ima Hooker).

The authors also interviewed adults today who had survived names like Candy Stohr, Cash Guy, Mary Christmas, River Jordan and Rasp Berry. All of them, even Happy Day, seemed untraumatized.

“They were very proud of their names, almost overly proud,” Mr. Sherrod said. “We asked if that was a reaction to getting pummeled when they were little, but they said they didn’t get that much ribbing. They did get a little tired of hearing the same jokes, but they liked having an unusual name because it made them stand out.”

My personal favorite paragraphs are these two:

Other researchers found that children with unusual names were more likely to have poorer and less educated parents, handicaps that explained their problems in school. Martin Ford and other psychologists reported, after controlling for race and ethnicity, that children with unusual names did as well as others in school. The economists Roland Fryer and Steven Levitt reached a similar conclusion after controlling for socioeconomic variables in a study of black children with distinctive names.

“Names only have a significant influence when that is the only thing you know about the person,” said Dr. Ford, a developmental psychologist at George Mason University. “Add a picture, and the impact of the name recedes. Add information about personality, motivation and ability, and the impact of the name shrinks to minimal significance.”

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