What's in a name?

Since I'm still recovering from the pain of being 37, and the additional pain of being 37 at a bachelor party in Montreal, I figured I'd pull a topic out of the "hangover" vault to keep you folks engaged for another week.

We made a big deal when Finn was born about how his name had somehow become ridiculously popular without our knowing it. Despite all of our plans for gifting our son with a cool, unique name, we met at least three other Finns his age within the first couple of months. Including one at our PEPS group.

Recently, Kitty found a handy little charting mechanism to show how a name's popularity has changed over time. As you can see, the data does bear out the fact that we were a little behind the curve on this one.

Having grown up with a common name (four Brians on my dorm floor freshman year), I decided to see how this stacked up against my name.

Notice how the peak right in the early '70's makes Finn's line practically disappear into the x-axis? That's great news. By my calculations he's now 500% less likely to end up with a freshman-year nickname that follows him around his entire life. Hopefully his wife will actually call him by his real name.

Hopefully he also ends up with a wife that's nice enough to post a happy birthday message and digs Star Wars vans.

Of course, it is also 500% less likely that he ends up with a wife at all, if/when his dates ever find this blog.