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longline's avatar

An alternate theory as to why male names weren't affected is that the names may have been too common. Bill, Ted, John, etc. have so many associations that the most recent terrible person may not be the only (or most salient) person with that name who comes to mind. There's a greater variety of girl's names than boy's names, so fewer girl's names are so generic. And then the effect on names such as Vladimir and Osama may not be only because the name is foreign, but because its foreignness means that it's more rare.

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Ron Yurko's avatar

No respect for the 1990 Leonardo bump from the live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie??!!

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Neil P Carver's avatar

Elvis isn't dead.

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Caz Hart's avatar

Yeah, you can change a birth certificate. 😁

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Marshall Shaffer's avatar

Maybe you left it off because there's already well-established scholarship around the name Madison, but it was basically non-existent as a girl name until 1984's SPLASH, at which point it took off and entered the top 5 girl names by 2000.

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Dylan Oxley's avatar

Such a fascinating read. It's disheartening to find that bad men brought to justice had no bearing on the usage of their names yet negatively impacted those of women.

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Dan Pal's avatar

Fascinating as always!

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John Galt's Bliss's avatar

Data would be more meaningful if it was normalized by looking at the per capita rate since the birth volume in the US is not constant each year.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/US-Live-Births-Population-Generations-and-MY-Ratio-This-figure-show-the-number-of_fig1_333523612

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rastronomicals's avatar

When I saw your headline, the first name that rushed into my head was Daenerys.

I remember reading something at the time of Game of Thrones' airing about how the long form of Dany's name had become popular with new parents.

And then of course her character fully destroyed her capital.

So was wondering if you had taken a look at it, or could be persuaded to. It might be an interesting shape to that curve.

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