The Tyranny of the Common Name
An acquaintance of mine asked me to email him something, so I asked him for his email address. He gave me his business card. It had only his first and last name printed on it, nothing else.
I said, “Uh…wait a sec…so what’s your email address?”
He said, “Just put my name into any reasonable search engine and my homepage will pop right up.”
I was immediately a little bit jealous – I’d always wanted to be able to use my name alone as a ‘personal URI’, but either I’m not famous enough or my name isn’t unique enough. Or some combination of the two.
If I put my first and last name into any *reasonable search engine*, I do not *pop right up*. In fact, the most famous person with my name is [an English darts player, who became even more famous for the first televised nine-dart finish.
I have on occasion told people they could find me (by which of course, I meant ‘find my little self-created electronic shrine on the web’) by putting my *full name* – first, middle, last – into a reasonable search engine and then my homepage (more or less) pops right up. And of course not everyone who might want to find me knows those details or realizes that they form a useful search key for finding me on the web.
Now, there’s a big business in trying to stand out in the results from search engines and I’m not even going to go there in this essay. “Optimizing” (some would say “gaming”) search engine results is in many ways a recapitulation of the process of trying to be first (or sometimes last) in lexicographic sort order in the yellow pages: AAAAAAA Plumbers has a better change of getting called by a desperate homeowner with a leaking toilet than the next name on the list. Ever since I was a child I’ve thought that people with names closer to the front of the alphabet have a bit of an advantage over those of us whose names put us in the back of the pack. But perhaps this advantage is cancelled out by those occasions when being first is the last thing one would want.
I think the little accidents (and sometimes choices) of personal and cultural history that automatically improve the visibility of certain individuals and bury others are a never-ending source of wonder. Conventions for personal names are really quite complicated, a topic of long and deep study called onomastics. If you go looking for this in wikipedia you’ll be disappointed – it’s only a placeholder for this topic. It’s a \hypernym of what you really want: anthroponymy (scans like *anthropology*).
The patronymic conventions which are frequently encountered in the modern descendents of Indo-European cultures are in fact rather recent (*Johnson* was at one time the son of someone named John, and *Berger* was something like a townsperson), but when considered from a more global perspective things get really interesting. It’s been estimated that there are 296 million Lis in the world (nearly the population of the US), this being the most common surname in China. (The notion *surname* is really not quite right here since in that part of the world the family name is usually cited first, but that’s how they’re called in my source. The same is true in Japan, Korea and elsewhere). In Burma, it was pretty common to name your kid after the day of the week he or she was born on, so there’s a dearth of first names there. In places where there are not a lot of people it’s not so hard to identify someone and so a single name does just fine; just don’t try to google someone from the Maldives and expect their email address to pop right up.
I really feel sorry for people who have names that are already in use as common nouns (or adjectives) – the Browns, Greens, Bushes, and Stones of the world – they’re even further down the search engine result list. Unless, again, you’re already famous, like Robin Hood. Oh wait, we now need to distinguish him from the rest of the robin hoods of the world out there giving to the poor after stealing from the rich. Oh, the irony of having one’s personal name become a household name! Or worse, a verb (e.g. to get *borked* or *meired*)
Perhaps someday conventions will arise to allow us commoners to distinguish ourselves from the hordes of others clamoring to use our names. I know someone who signs his emails ‘Jeff (meaning “an instance of Jeff” in Lisp). Or perhaps we could start using our email addresses or screen names – it would certainly help in disambiguating names in scientific papers. Anyone for an ISO standard for adding diacritics, indexicals, or skolems to names to distinguish one from another?
I’d love to hear from you if you are interested in this topic. Just put my full name, all three of them, into any reasonable search engine and you’ll find me.
-John (Brandon) Lowe, Senior Scientist
