What's In A Name?

Consider the most popular names in colonial New England:

GIRLS	BOYS
Abigail	Abraham
Abstinence	Adam
Anne	Amos
Ashes	Benjamin
Belief	Cotton
Charity	David
Chastity	Earnest
Comfort	Ebenezer
Constance	Eliab
Devotion	Elihu
Diligence	Ezekiel
Dorcas	George
Elizabeth	Humble
Esther	Increase
Eve	Ira
Faith	Isaac
Felicity	Isaiah
Godly	James
Goodwife	Japhet
Goody	Jedediah
Grace	Jepthah
Handmaid	Jeremiah
Hannah	John
Helpless	Jonas
Hester	Joseph
Honour	Luke
Hope	Malachi
Humility	Mark
Joy	Matthew
Justice	Micah
Leah	Michael
Love	Moses
Lydia	Naphthali
Martha	Nathaniel
Mary	Paul
Meek	Peter
Mercy	Resolved
Naomi	Samuel
Obedience	Saul
Patience	Seth
Pearl	Solomon
Providence	William
Prudence	Zachariah
Purity [Girls Only Hereafter]
Rachel
Rebecca
Repentance
Ruth
Salvation
Sarah
Steadfast
Thankful
Truth
Virtue

Thank goodness—for my sake—Dumbass is found nowhere in Scripture. If this (fair & balanced) nomenclature, so be it.

[x The Economist]
Moniker's progress
The names that parents give their children illuminate cultural evolution

Had Apple Blythe Alison Martin—the offspring of a celebrity couple, Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin—been born a boy, it is quite possible she would have had been given something of a more normal name. This suggestion arises from research into changing fashions in children's names, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society. Alexander Bentley, of University College, London, and his colleagues are studying the mathematics of cultural transmission. For this sort of work, birth records—which contain every instance in a country of one sort of cultural object, namely people's first names—are a particularly good source of data.

Dr Bentley looked at the frequencies of different first names in American babies. One of his findings was that the “mutation rate” in names is higher for girls than for boys. Parents, in other words, are more liable to be inventive when choosing a name for a baby girl. The researchers have found that for every 10,000 daughters born in America there is an average of 2.3 new names. For sons, the figure is 1.6.

Dr Bentley is not sure why this is the case. One possibility is that in a society where family names are inherited patrilineally, parents feel constrained by tradition when it comes to choosing first names for their sons. As a result, boys often end up with the names of their ancestors. But when those same parents come to choose names for their daughters, they feel less constrained and more able to choose based on style and beauty.

Such tendencies, however, do change with the times. Novelty in names, as defined by new names entering the list of the top 1,000 American names, was high for both sexes in the 1970s, went down in the 1980s, and then increased in the 1990s. This increase was especially notable in boys' names (eg, Jaden). During the 1990s, there were 184 new boys' names on the list, the largest number of any decade of the 20th century. Dr Bentley speculates that this may be because patriarchal naming customs are declining, and because Old Testament names (Jacob, Noah) are replacing those from the New (John, Paul).

Overall, the pattern of children's names resembles the mathematical pattern that would be produced by random copying. One consequence of this is that most names are found at low frequencies (Hannibal, Eustace, Phoenix). Only a handful (John, David, Christopher) are common.

Changes in frequency often seem to be random, too. There is, of course, a celebrity effect—which is why the world is blessed with more Britneys than it used to be. But that does not explain the rise of Tyler, which first appeared in the top 1,000 in the 1950s, and reached the top ten in 1992.

Though fashion in names is a particularly good example of the phenomenon, Dr Bentley is finding that random copying seems to drive many forms of cultural change, from patterns on ancient clay pots to preferences for breeds of dog.

For some, this is disappointing. Many students of cultural evolution hope to find analogies with biological evolution by natural selection, not just random drift, when they look at cultural change. Hence the appropriation from biology of the term “mutation rate”. There is even a word for what they hope will turn out to be the cultural equivalent of a gene. This word is “meme”. People's names and the patterns on clay pots would be good examples of memes, if such things do, in fact, exist.

All may not be lost, though. Non-randomness clearly exists alongside the basic random pattern. The celebrity effect, for example, works not only for names, but for dog breeds. Dalmatians became popular after the release of a film version of Dodie Smith's novel “101 Dalmatians”. Celebrity, therefore, seems to be one way for memes to gain fitness—and, crucially, one that benefits the meme (in the sense of allowing it to spread) without benefiting the individual transmitting it (no one has ever shown that possession of a particular name brings advantages).

However, celebrity is transient and familiarity does breed contempt. Today, Dalmatians—just like the name John—are far less popular than they used to be.

Copyright © 2004 The Economist Newspaper and The Economist Group. All rights reserved.

W: A Second-Rate Dutch, Or Is There Such A Thing As A C-Picture Actor?

The orgiastic celebration of Reagan's presidency is at an end (at last). Now, poor W is on his own again. The news from Iraq (and now Saudi Arabia) just gets worse and worse. The most dangerous road in Iraq is the freeway from downtown to the airport. If this is (fair & balanced) disillusionment, so be it.

[x NYTimes]
First Reagan, Now His Stunt Double
by FRANK RICH


"BOY, if life were only like this," says Woody Allen in "Annie Hall" after he brings out the actual Marshall McLuhan to silence a pontificating McLuhan expert with whom he's trapped on a movie line. Well, last weekend life was like that.

George W. Bush was all suited up in Normandy to repeat Ronald Reagan's 1984 blockbuster elegy to "the boys of Pointe du Hoc" (screenplay by Peggy Noonan). It was not the first time that the current president had taken a page from his fabled predecessor's script, but it may have been the most humiliating. The D-Day-eve timing of Reagan's death had pushed the replay of his original oration to center stage on TV, much as the real McLuhan is yanked on screen in "Annie Hall." And as the McLuhan wannabe soon slinks away in that movie, so Mr. Bush's would-be Reaganesque speech atomized into white noise, to the limited extent that it was broadcast at all.

Some would argue that no politician in his right mind would even invite comparisons to the Great Communicator. In the aftermath of Reagan's death, his fans and foes alike remain agog at his performance chops. Kennedy may have brought the Rat Pack to the White House, but no one has ever arrived there with Reagan's particular gifts as an entertainer. They were a product of training, not accident. He had first performed as a child in church skits put on by his mother. Later came the legendary path through baseball announcing, 52 feature films, "General Electric Theater" and the conservative speaking circuit, where he honed what became known as the Speech. Not even other Hollywood-spawned politicians, whether George Murphy before him or Arnold Schwarzenegger after, can match this résumé. To see the difference between an acting professional and an aspiring amateur, just look at the one recent president who had show business on the brain, Bill Clinton. Though Mr. Clinton's act may be better than any Reagan successor, he nonetheless lacks the master's disciplined ability to hit his mark, not to mention his timing, ready wit and brevity.

Mr. Clinton went so far as to incongruously appropriate Reagan ideology ("The era of big government is over") for political expediency. But no one has more strenuously tried to emulate the 40th president in both style and substance than George W. Bush. Reagan's body was barely cold when Ed Gillespie, the Republican chairman, said: "The parallels are there. I don't know how you miss them." Yes, the parallels are there — hammered in by Mr. Bush's packagers so we can never miss them. But Karl Rove and company may have overplayed their hand. The orgiastic celebration of Reagan's presidency over the past week, an upbeat Hollywood epic that has glided past Iran-contra, Bitburg and the retreat from Lebanon with impressive ease, has brought into clear focus the size of the gap between the two men. To say that difference in stature is merely a function of an actor's practiced skill at performance is both to understate the character of Ronald Reagan and to impugn the art of acting.

The White House's efforts to follow the Reagan playbook have been nothing if not relentless. As Michael Deaver's crew famously would have Reagan cut ribbons in front of nursing homes even as he cut funds for their construction, so Mr. Bush can be found communing with nature each time his administration takes a whack at the environment. To pass himself off as a practiced hand at proletarian manual labor, Mr. Bush clears brush on camera at his ranch in Crawford just as Mr. Reagan did in Santa Barbara. In Washington, the Bush speechwriters strain to equate an "axis of evil" with the "evil empire."

Even his personality is presented to the public as a clone of Reagan's. Mr. Bush is always characterized by his associates as a "big picture" guy who leaves any detail that can't be fit on a 3-by-5 card to his aides. As Donald Rumsfeld says in Bob Woodward's "Plan of Attack": "This president has a lot of the same quality that Ronald Reagan did where he'd look out, way out to the horizon and plant a standard out there and then point toward it."

To some who admire both men, the analogy is plausible. Mr. Bush's certitude about his war on terrorism matches Reagan's unyielding anti-communism. Both presidents made a religion out of big tax cuts, talked of curbing government even as they increased spending and then serenely ignored the daunting deficits that ensued.

Those who dislike both men see less salutary parallels. Both presidents tried every stunt imaginable to create the illusion that their wartime service had not been confined to the home front. Both pandered to the religious right by impeding urgently needed federal medical research that would have saved lives (Reagan with AIDS, Mr. Bush with stem cells). Where Bush and Reagan boosters see both men as refreshingly disdainful of intellectuals, critics see a smug lack of curiosity in any ideas but their own. The ur-text of today's profuse Bushisms can be found in such Reaganisms as his remarks upon returning from a trip to South America: "Well, I learned a lot. . . . You'd be surprised. They're all individual countries." Both presidents inspired "Tonight Show" gags about their endless vacations.

But whether one likes either president or not, the difference between them remains far greater than any similarities, and that difference has more ramifications during a hot war than a cold one. Reagan may have been an actor, but in Garry Wills's famous phrase, he played "the heartwarming role of himself." Though he never studied with Lee Strasberg, he practiced the method; his performance was based, however loosely, on the emotional memory of a difficult youth as the son of an itinerant, sometimes unemployed alcoholic. That Reagan triumphed over this background during the Depression, developing the considerable ambition needed to work his way through college and eventually to Warner Brothers, informed the sentimental optimism that both defined (and limited) his vision of America as a place where perseverance could pay off for anyone. It was indeed the heartwarming role of himself (with the New Deal backdrop of his own biography eventually stripped out).

Yet there was more to Reagan's role than its Horatio Alger success story. Reagan may have stayed in Culver City during the war, but as a teenage riverfront lifeguard in Illinois, he rescued 77 people, demonstrating early on the physical courage that would see him through an assassination attempt. And for all Reagan's absorption in show business, he was always engaged in politics (to the point of alienating his first wife, Jane Wyman, who found his preoccupation a bore). As president of the Screen Actors Guild in the late 40's, he was at the center of fierce labor and blacklisting battles.

Nor was he wholly isolated from the America beyond Hollywood. A contract player who became "Errol Flynn of the B's," he wasn't a big enough star to merit all the perquisites of top show-biz royalty. As his movie career dwindled in the early 50's, he was briefly reduced to serving (at age 42) as the baggy-pants M.C. to a cheesy, showgirl-laden revue at the Last Frontier casino on the Vegas strip. Once he was reborn as a G.E. spokesman, he spent years meeting workers in the company factories that he repeatedly toured when off camera.

Whether you liked or loathed the performance that Mr. Reagan would give as president, it derived from this earlier immersion in the real world. The script he used in the White House was often romanticized and fictional; he invented or embroidered anecdotes (including that ugly demonization of a "welfare queen") and preached family values he didn't practice with his own often-estranged children. But even the fiction was adapted from experience. While he had arrived in politics in middle-age with the aid of a kitchen cabinet of wealthy financial backers, there had been decades when he lived in an America broader than that of Justin Dart and Alfred Bloomingdale.

Mr. Bush's aw-shucks persona, by contrast, has been manufactured from scratch. He has rarely, if ever, ventured out of the cocoon of privilege. He "lost a lot of other people's money in the oil business," said Ron Reagan Jr. in 2000. "What is his accomplishment? That he's no longer an obnoxious drunk?" While the young Ronald Reagan used his imagination to improvise play-by-play radio accounts of baseball games based on sparse telegraphic accounts, Mr. Bush made a killing on a baseball team with the help of cronies and sweetheart deals. He has no history of engagement with either issues or people beyond big oil or the Andover-Yale-Harvard orbit until he belatedly went into the family business of politics.

He does the down-home accent well, and he dresses the part. In the new issue of The Atlantic, a linguist hypothesizes to James Fallows that Mr. Bush, a smoother speaker in his Texas political career than now, may have "deliberately made himself sound as clipped and tough as John Wayne" since then "as a way of showing deep-down Nascar-type manliness." It's as if he's eradicating his patrician one-term father to adopt the two-term Gipper as his dad instead. But unlike Reagan, Mr. Bush is so inured to the prerogatives of his life of soft landings that his attempts to affect a jus' folks geniality are invariably betrayed by nastiness whenever someone threatens to keep him from getting his own way. It's impossible to imagine Reagan countenancing the impugning of the patriotism of war heroes like John McCain and Max Cleland as the Bush machine has done in the heat of close campaigns.

Last weekend in Normandy, the president sat for an interview in which Tom Brokaw challenged his efforts to pull off a bigger flimflam than impersonating Ronald Reagan — the conflation of the Iraq war with World War II. "You referred to the `ruthless and treacherous surprise attack on America' that we went through during our time," Mr. Brokaw said. "But that wasn't Iraq who did that, that was al Qaeda." With the gravesites of the World War II dead behind him, the president retreated to his familiar script ("Iraq is a part of the war on terror"). Even if you think the lines make sense, the irritated man delivering them did not sound like someone who had ever experienced pain of the life-and-death intensity that comes with war. The problem is not merely that Mr. Bush lacks Reagan's lilting vocal delivery. As any professional actor can tell you, no performance, however sonorous, can be credible if it doesn't contain at least a kernel of emotional truth.

Copyright © 2004 The New York Times Company