Open Mike: Web-Safe Baby Names and Other Tales of the Millennium

Bestsellers: We're barely 18 years into the third millennium, but that allows us to say things like "the best car of the entire millennium!" Humans adore hyperbole, so we love that. Case in point: there's an actual real article on Forbes.com called "I've Discovered The Best Smartphone Of All Time...." (It was the 2011 Palm Pre, according to the author, if you're curious. Amazingly, it beat out every smartphone from the 17th century, hands down. What are the chances?)

I'm waiting for a construction like "the best camera of 2018 of all time." It makes no sense, unless you're human, in which case, somehow, it does.

Anyway, books: of the bestselling books of this millennium of all time, 11 1/2 of the top ten are, of course, Harry Potter books. The popularity of these books is inexplicable to everyone, but I have the explanation: they're autobiographical. J.K. Rowling is Hermione, all grown up, and she bewitched all the muggles into buying her books by the millions.

How do I know? It's Occam's Razor: I've read some of the Harry Potter books, and this is the only possible explanation.

But here's the amazing fact I wanted to relate: according to one list, the Number 22 bestseller of this millennium so far is a book that came out all the way back in 1960, and never ranked higher than third for any given year: To Kill a Mockingbird by the late Harper Lee. It supposedly sells a million copies a year, more than all but a tiny handful of contemporary books. Take that, third millennium.

Mary Badham as Scout and Gregory Peck as Atticus
in the movie version of To Kill a Mockingbird

The Great Crime Decline: The most remarkable change in our society in this millennium, according to a book review by Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, is one that is not very often talked about or mentioned in the news: violent crime has dropped drastically across the Western world. In New York City, the epicenter of the change, violent crime used to routinely claim more than 2,000 lives every year; but far fewer—328—lost their lives to crime in 2014, and the number has been dropping still lower since then.

A new book, Uneasy Peace by Patrick Sharkey, recounts the decline in detail. It's written from a left-leaning perspective but looks unflinchingly at right-leaning explanations, such as increases in incarceration and the more brutal police tactics many Americans protest. (The bestseller Freakonomics offered as an explanation the increase in abortions, i.e., the lowering of the number of unwanted babies.) The unavoidable overall conclusion, however, is that everyone is mystified: no one can really explain the Great Crime Decline.

Money for nothing and your chicks for free:  The first album to sell more in CD format than vinyl—and the first to sell more than a million in the then-still-new CD format—was Dire Straits' Brothers in Arms, released in May 1985. Now, while vinyl is continuing its admittedly modest comeback, CD is apparently going the way of the 8-track tape. Starbucks quit offering compilation CDs at its checkout counters in 2015, and now, Best Buy has announced that it will cease to sell CDs as of July 1, and Target will reportedly be switching its suppliers to a consignment model.

The Compact Disc peaked in 2002 when sales of the format accounted for 95.5% of recorded music sales. By 2016, CD sales fell below 16 percent of total recorded music revenues. Not coincidentally, 2016 was the first year that subscriptions to streaming services became the top source of revenue for recorded music, as well as the first year of an overall increase in revenues in this millennium. This is bad news for musicians, though, who earn very little from streaming services. It's likely that in coming years a musician will become a much less cool thing to be, because you won't be able to earn much money from it.

Internet-effective baby names: I'm not saying a baby's name in the new millennium needs to be weird, like Kill-sin Pimple, who registered for jury duty in England in the 1650s, or jokey, like Shanda Lear, daughter of Bill and Moya Lear of Lear Jet fame (Shanda's brother was named King! Ouch. Thanks to Misha for that). I am however of the opinion that it would be wise, in this day and age, to give new babies an ordinary name plus a distinctive name—first and middle or middle and first—so they will be one day be able to register their own unique email address.

Take as an example, say, "Julia Smith." I'm going to guess that juliasmith@gmail.com and @juliasmith are already taken. But what if Julia's middle name was something distinctive, like Julia Sojourner Smith or Julia Payslee Smith? A unique Twitter address just got more likely for Julia. John Doe could instead be something like John Dante Doe or Rocco John Doe.

The practice would have two good effects: not only would it make distinctiveness on the Internet much easier for the 21st-century baby once the time came, but it would offer the child a choice of names to go by once he or she grows up—one ordinary, one exotic.

For instance, I have a new relative named Roscoe Thomas M———. This is perfect, because baby Roscoe Thomas will have a choice when he grows up: he can go by Tom if he wants to blend in and be an ordinary (so to speak) joe; or, if he chooses a profession where it's good to stand out and be distinctive, he can go by Roscoe, which I believe is a name that's fairly unusual even in its native Scotland, where Jack has been the top male baby name for ten years in a row. According to the Social Security Administration, Roscoe in the U.S. declined from a high of 171st most popular male baby name in 1901 to falling out of the top 1,000 for good (so far) in 1978.

There are a lot of Toms; there aren't many Roscoes. So the young man will have his choice. And, while there will probably be a lot of people named Thomas M——— on Facebook (his last name isn't uncommon), there probably won't be very many people named Roscoe Thomas M———.

If you're naming a child any time soon, you might consider this approach. Oh, and if your last name happens to be Pimple: just do your best not to make things any worse.

Mike

"Open Mike" is the often off-topic editorial page of TOP, when Yr. Hmbl. Ed. is let off the leash. It appears on Wednesdays.

Original contents copyright 2018 by Michael C. Johnston and/or the bylined author. All Rights Reserved. Links in this post may be to our affiliates; sales through affiliate links may benefit this site.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

PacNW: "The Great Crime Decline: The bigger question is why there was such a big spike in crime. All spikes end so the end may be less interesting than the beginning. Some studies showed that the increase was closely tied to children growing up near freeways and other busy roads during the era of leaded gasoline. Lead is a neurotoxin that causes exactly the type of brain damage in children that is associated with criminal behavior. The generation that grew up after leaded gasoline was banned did not end up having as much criminal behavior. Check out some of the charts online. The correlation is striking."

Tom: "I have a friend in California whose son was asked to change his name upon joining his first employer, as were all new employees, in order to shed any existing social media trail."

paul in Az: "A comment on the correlation of crime and leaded gas. Correlation does not necessarily imply causation. My professor of public health put up two graphs. One was the seasonal incidence of polio, peaking in mid summer. The other was the seasonal sales of ice cream. They were a perfect match. If correlation means causation then it is obvious that ice cream causes polio."

Fredrik Rutz: "In response to PacNW. Correlation is not causation. As shown clearly (and funnily) by Tyler Vigen."

Mike replies: Omigod those are hilarious. I'm relieved however to learn that fewer people are drowning after falling out of fishing boats. And my son would say that the one about Nicholas Cage films and swimming pool drownings is causal (he can't stand N.C.). However I am dismayed to learn that people die by becoming tangled in their bedsheets. That's a sad way to go. Thanks for that Fredrik, made my day today.

Ernest J. Zarate: "Internet-effective baby names.... My full name is Ernest Joseph Zarate, named after my maternal and paternal grandfathers, respectively. As I was born Dec. 27, 1955, I posit that my parents invented this naming strategy long before the Internet was a twinkle in Al Gore's eyes.

"I went by 'Joe' for the first 20+ years of my life, as evidenced in family photos when I was a wee one. My mother dutifully wrote the names of everyone in any photo on the back, and I was always identified as Joe, though my first name was Ernest. This was a deal my parents reached: name me for my mom's dad, but call me by my dad's dad's name. It was so pervasive that, when as a young adult I put in for official ID, I'd often enter my name as Joseph E. Zarate (rather a mess to untangle later on).

"Anytime anyone called me Ernest (it was, after all, my official name), I'd say, 'Call me Joe....' Until I was a student at San Francisco Art Institute in the mid-1970s, when one of my professors, Hank Wessel, was taking role on the first day of school. There was something about the way his East Coast accent affected the name 'Ernest' that made me on the spot not say anything to correct him. So for those few years, in that rarified atmosphere that was SFAI, I went by Ernest. Then it was back to Joe.

"It stayed Joe until a few years ago, when I met the woman who would be my (second) wife. At first, she called me Joe. Then she started calling me Ernest (I cannot abide the nickname 'Ernie' at all). And once again, it clicked. It's been Ernest ever since, and will be for whatever time I still have left.

"I like its uniqueness, its association with 'earnest' (though that is a pet peeve when people spell my name that way), its connection the past and my past, and very much the way it sounds.

"To all who may be considering names like Ernest, Roscoe or other 'old world' names, do not be dissuaded by their lack of popularity. Worn by the right soul, they are just right."

Joe: "Twenty-six and 23 years ago, my wife and I gave our kids double last names. Friends and relatives warned us how much that was going to complicate our kids' lives in the long run. But it turns out we were prescient: Unique usernames and domain names."

David L.: "Re musicians not earning much money: My wife is a full time musician. Most are lucky to break even in a tax year, even with numerous gigs and an occasional album release. It doesn't matter what media their music is released on. They play out of dedication, not necessarily for monetary rewards. They really embody the term starving artist."

Elton Pinto: "Another in the list of hyperbole that has always annoyed me is the 'Miss Universe' contest.... Why didn't we stop at world?"

Mike replies: Same thing for me with the phrase "known Universe"...we "know" it, now? Bit of human hubris in that.

Paulo Bizarro: "The naming thing reminded me of the character major Major Major in Catch 22...."

Comments

[mark]

re: The Great Crime Decline. The drop in airborne lead resulting from the phaseout of leaded gasoline may explain the Great Crime Decline. It certainly explains it better than abortions or incarceration.

[Jim R]

A possible link to the decrease in crime and lead exposure is explored in - Lead: America’s Real Criminal Element, by Kevin Drum. The political slant and the author’s extrapolations aside, more study is needed and the link seems very plausible. The link in Drum’s article to the 2000 paper by HUD consultant Rick Nevin doesn’t work, but the paper is available on Rick’s website.

[Vince]

"The popularity of these books is inexplicable to everyone…"

It's inexplicable to hardly anyone. It's easily explicable — it's a great story well-told.

TKAM is one of the great wonders of the last millenium, but it's 22nd because it's on the high school reading list. It's assigned reading, which seems to render its magic powerless to those to whom it is assigned.

I just had a conversation about this book with a teenager a couple of weeks ago — he was halfway into it, and didn't really like it. The next week he had finished it, and said it had "redeemed itself". Personally I don't know how anyone's not in love with the book after five pages.

But then I loved Harry Potter, too. :)

[Hey! I didn't say the popularity of TKAM was inexplicable! And the popularity of TKAM can't be explained by reading lists, because it outsells other reading list stalwarts by great margins. --Mike]

[James Weekes]

First of all, I live on Roscoe Blvd. down here in Florida, so little Tom can always come here if the name is strange where he lives. Secondly, I believe that violent crime has been ebbing for far longer than that. Now is actually the safest time to live, in the First world.....ever. And yet all the newsies can tell us is how unsafe it is.

[Hugh Alison]

I picked up all the family .com first and second names about 15 years ago :)

[Speed]

Any mention of unusual names brings to (my) mind Moon Unit Zappa. www.moonunit.com is taken but GoDaddy will work to secure it for $69.99 plus the cost of the actual URL.

Everything I know about Harry Potter I learned today at The Online Photographer. Never read any of the books and somehow missed the movies -- there are movies aren't there?

[Stephen Scharf]

I was going to mention that the reduction in crime was due to a signifcant decrease in the exposure of children to lead, but others have already chimed in on that. Not just leaded gasoline, but exposure to lead-based paints in furniture, etc.

[Jim M]

My my neighbor’s dog is named Roscoe. He’s a good boy! Maybe they can visit.

[Tom Burke]

Recorded music revenue: I'm not entirely clear about how much artists can earn from streaming, or indeed how much they could earn from CD/LP sales. I don't mean artists at the level of the Rolling Stones, Dire Straits or Elton Johns of the recording industry - I mean the journeyman bands (or artists) who get to release a few records, have no real hits, and mainly earn from live performances. Obviously very little of the actual purchase price of a CD went to the artist - there was tax, retailer's margin, transportation costs, wholesaler's margin, production costs, record company's margin - very little would be left for the band or artist, and in the case of a band, it had to be split as many ways as the band had members. (Plus the manager's cut, of course.) Wasn't it possible - frequent, even - for a band to exit a contract owing the record company money?

[Bob Keefer]

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, a regional theater with a big reputation these days, mounted a stage adaptation of TKAM in 2011. The show was fully sold out for its four-month run well BEFORE opening night.

This was in large part caused by the significant (assigned) school-kid audience the festival enjoys and an accident of the rest of the festival's calendar. The 2011 OSF season lacked any broadly popular major Shakespeare show (such as 'Hamlet,' say, or 'King Lear'), and the schools that bus their kids to Ashland for OSF needed something to sign up for. They all seized on TKAM.

Critics, myself included, wrote that the show was very OK but not especially exciting. Every seat was taken for four months anyway.

[James]

"Oh, and if your last name happens to be Pimple: just do your best not to make things any worse."
Yeah, like don't squeeze it or pick at it.....

[Patrick Perez]

Turner Classic Movies was showing in theaters on my birthday last year MY FAVORITE MOVIE OF ALL TIME. I posted to Facebook that when I described it as such, I was including the future.

Patrick

[Soeren Engelbrecht]

When my wife and I talked about potential first names for our kids - now 9 and 13 - a non-negotiable point from my side was that they shouldn’t have any of the Danish/Scandinavian letters æ, ø, or å in their names. It’s just a pain to use them online. My first name is Søren, and that is written either as Soeren (my personal choice) or Soren (which my employer chose to do) in mail addresses, etc. We ended up with Anton (Anton Corbijn is one of my favourites) and Asta. I believe the least you can do is give your children un-problematic names :-)

[Bruce Appelbaum]

The Lear's might have found a different name for their daughter Shanda. In Yiddish, the word means shame, disgrace, scandal, humiliation. Of course few really good Yiddish words can be translated directly into English.

SHANDA: A shame, a scandal. The expression "a shanda fur die goy" means to do something embarrassing to Jews where non-Jews can observe it.

[misha]

"Shanda Lear, daughter of Bill and Moya Lear of Lear Jet fame"

Bill Lear named his son King.

[Terry Burnes]

Kevin Drum is pretty convincing about lead and crime:

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2018/02/an-updated-lead-crime-roundup-for-2018/

It's odd that Adam Gopnik doesn't seem to mention this (I only searched his piece for "lead," I didn't read it).

Fighting crime can be a convenient excuse for a lot of misguided policy and funding. I'm sure many "crime fighters" don't want to hear that an environmental policy might have been more effective than they.

[Arg]

Do you still define an electronic file sale as a *book* sale, Mike?

Are those figures you were quoting (e.g. To Kill a Mockingbird) more correctly *story* sales, not actual books as I define them?

The other possibility about TKAM sales volumes is that it might be required reading in schools....

[DavidB]

Just last night our son called to say they had probably finalized the name for their soon-to-be-born son. His first name will be my wife's maiden name (now her middle name) and his middle name will match that of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather.

Neither name is uncommon—but not top 100 either—so the combination could be reasonably unique.

[Manuel]

People who follow Formula 1 will never name their baby 'Roscoe.' Lewis Hamilton, incumbent world champion, has a Bulldog named Roscoe. (Which, it must be said, is a brilliant name for that kind of dog.)

[Paul Gessler]

A name like Roscoe Thomas M——— is also great for testing the Unicode compatibility of websites, PDF forms, and the like. :-) 😂

[adamct]

FWIW, the claim that the legalization of abortion was the primary cause of the decline in crime has been heavily criticized. I am not qualified to judge the arguments, but I think it is one of those claims that gets repeated enough that it is at least worth mentioning that it disputed.

Regards,
Adam

P.S. I wrote this not because of any ideological reasons, but just as a caution regarding the reliability of the claim.

[John Camp]

re the correlation between ice cream and polio mentioned by another commenter. Polio is a virus commonly spread by flies. Ice cream attracts flies. Therefore, ice cream causes polio. Makes perfectly good sense to me.

re, "the best," etc.

We had a saying in the Twin Cities, "World Famous in Minneapolis." It may also apply in other cities.

[Tex Andrews]

Names, Beatcha toit: 1st daughter, 1990, Margaret Renn McKibbon Andrews; 2nd daughter, 1993, Martha Phoebe Mathilde Andrews. All family names.

[Mani Sitaraman]

Thank you for posting that beautifully lit still photograph from To Kill a Mockingbird.

A great way to learn about lighting, natural or artificial, is to pay close attention to movies, especially older black and white movies. Cinematographers and their lighting colleagues have a masterly command of lighting, and almost every scene in a commercial studio movie is perfectly lit in the context of the scene and the mood that is called for by the script.

That level of professionalism is essential—movies are very, very expensive undertakings, and movie-makers cannot afford to have flaws in a visual product that is shown to millions of pairs of eyes which then examine it closely for a couple of hours in a darkened room.

That being said, the shot above was almost certainly created on the set, separate from the filming, in a session devoted to producing publicity stills. Older commenters (i.e. old fogies like me) will remember a time when lobbies of movie theaters had publicity 8x10 glossies of scenes from the movie that the audience was about to watch.

[Keith]

Names. My rule is that parents give their kid one name, and whatever their agreed family name is. The kid chooses their own name at the age when they are old enough to comprehend the complications of beaurecratic paperworks.

[Patrick Dodds]

The cheese / death-by-sheet correlation could actually be a thing.

[Martin Doonan]

Interesting reading all. Re music royalties: You, like many others, have drawn the comparison between streaming & CD sales, which I've never seen as like-for-like. Surely the streaming model is more akin to radio play, and from that point of view would seem to benefit small acts rather more than current air-play models. I think it's the big acts who have to most to lose from streaming services where the marketing machine seems less likely to get them on to playlists. But I'm no expert...

[Paul Van]

Interesting fact: until the JK Rowling steamroller got underway, Sir Terry Pratchett was the best-selling fantasy author in the UK. I've always for Sir Terry's book to be more 'human,' if that makes any sense.

As far as unique names go, I think I have that covered! There are another nine letters after the 'Van' plus I have two middle names. I also tend to use variations of my first name for online sites - such as Pablo - to further confuse people who may know I am of Belgian descent. And my email is a mashup of my first name and part of my last name!

Perhaps I may have taken things too far! lol

[Calvin amari]

Re: the mucisian issue. Very e and very bad. See generally: https://thetrichordist.com/about-2/the-101/

[Zack Schindler]

And another one in the list of hyperbole that I can't stand is The World Series. Really, when only two countries are involved? How about this other 193? I wonder if Melilla could get a team together to compete. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melilla

[I think that's different because in 1903 when the first one was played, nations were much more parochial and the world was much larger--to get to Europe you had to sit on a boat for five days. Colonialism was still in flower and racism was alive and well. "World" could be interpreted as the world of baseball rather than the globe. But maybe I'm just blowing smoke. If you choose not to agree I won't argue too hard. --Mike]

[steveH]

Another possible cause for changing violent crime rates is the rise and subsequent drop in the ratio of 15-34 year old males to the whole population, as that is the period of highest likelihood of violent behavior.

I kind of like the use of "known universe", with its implication that there's more we don't know. Probably influenced there with the Known Space stories of Larry Niven and friends.

[John McMillin]

Speaking of anything and everything, the impact of Harry Potter is so huge that it's changed the English language, British-izing it for a generation of America's youth. For evidence, just listen to any NPR show. They've been aggressively eliminating any personnel over 40, making them a pure window into the vocalizations of youth. About every five minutes, I seem to hear someone pronounce multisyllabic words with syllable breaks that sound unfamiliar to my US-born, non-Potterized ears. Words like "mount-ains," "connect-ed" and "import-ant" show the British habit of separating root word and suffix at the consonant, rather than the American practice of saying the last consonant of the first syllable with the final syllable, to create a smoother flow: "moun-tains, connec-ted, impor-tant."

How important this really is is open for discussion. It will be interesting to see if this linguistic quirk is permanent. But once you start hearing this, you can't stop hearing it.

[Bill Tyler]

Please be careful in using correlations. The graph at the top of this page, https://io9.gizmodo.com/on-correlation-causation-and-the-real-cause-of-auti-1494972271 is something no one takes seriously as a cause-effect proof. Yet it shows that the rise in autism correlates very strongly with the rise in organic food sales. Lead may well be different. There are known neurological effects from lead. But I'd be very hesitant to take even a strong mathematical correlation as any kind of proof, without more evidence.

[Howard]

My late grandfather was a tailor from Poland, who with a very thick accent used to walk around and say "shanda for degoyim"...."it's a shanda for degoyim". For years I wondered who this Shanda person was and why did my grandfather always say her name.
It was not until I was a teenager did I understand.

For those not literate in Yiddish, you need to use your google machine to understand.

[Mike R]

"A successful musician is one who can buy groceries."

I think it was Billy Joel who said that, but I can't confirm it.

[Bill Tyler]

"The known universe" shouldn't be interpreted as "we know the universe." Instead, it means to limit the accompanying statement to be true only for the minute portion of the universe that we know. By analogy, I might say that gorillas are not a factor in any of the known plays of Sophocles. That says nothing about the unknown plays (only 7 of an estimated 120 plays of Sophocles have survived).

[PG Earl]

One important reason for the decline in the murder rate is much better life-saving technology used by emergency medical people — especially what ambulances have on board. When every minute counts, technology like trauma pants can and do make the difference between life and death. When people got shot, more of them used to bleed to death. Now more people are saved from hypovolemic shock — resulting in a lower murder rate. I heard about it from an NYC emergency room nurse.

[Ramón Acosta]

Rosco P. Coltrane was going around my head all throughout reading all the comments. Just for fun you should google Pablo Picasso's full name.
When my wife was pregnant we struck a deal, if a boy I would choose the name, and if a girl, she would . So my son was born and being half russian and half mexican, I chose 2 names, a traditional and popular russian name and the name of one of the aztec emperors.
Funny thing, even in Mexico, people thought his aztec name was russian.

[John Ironside]

I think the correlation of the time of phase-out of lead and the drop in crime some 20 years later was shown consistently across many jurisdictions, in different US states that eliminated lead in gasoline at different times, and in other nations too, usually with regulation at the national level.
Lead paint is still causing serious harm, though, as discussed in this recent Economist article: <http://econ.st/2D9fjy1>.

[Eugene Seidel]

Just an addition Paulo Bizarro's comment on the character in Catch 22: The character's name was actually Major Major Major Major. His father named him Major Major Major as a joke, and M3 was given the rank of Major by an IBM machine with a sense of humor, according to Wikipedia. Bob Newhart played the character in the movie, which seems fitting.