First Names, Surnames, Blah Blah....

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A fairly interesting and mildly amusing piece, IMO:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/21 ... rsonality/


No doubt the idea of a correlation between first names and general competence has elements of political incorrectness, stereotyping and so on, but I couldn't help finding it a bit funny.

I've also always found the practice of using surnames as first names very strange, and used to regard it as largely an American or Australian phenomenon, but it seems to have become increasingly common in the UK over the years. I can't imagine why someone would want to call their offspring Todd, Brett, Lloyd, Taylor and the like. Then again, I'm probably irretrievably old-fashioned.....

I wonder if anyone's ever been given 'Trump' as a first name.

^ LOL, priceless!

That's very priceless.

I may call my next cat, Istomin(a). He/she will be a Russian Blue, of course!

Depressing article

One of my names (I won't reveal it here) was rated as low both in warmth and competence. I'm a two-time loser.

On the other hand, one of my cats had a name of both high competence and warmth. At least I had a great cat!

Well I'm glad at least someone here has read the article and has found it worthy of comment. I can see why it could be found to be depressing, but on the other hand anyone who has a taste for inappropriate humour or ideas at odds with the zeitgeist (of which there must be a good number on this site) might find the subject matter interesting or even entertaining.

A couple of first names acquired a certain amount of negative connotation or even notoriety in the UK during the 1990s, owing to the appearance in Viz magazine of 'The Fat Slags', a cartoon strip about a pair of overweight, badly educated, foul-mouthed and sexually promiscuous young women named Sandra and Tracey. I'd post an example or two, but really the content belongs in the 'Adult' section.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fat_Slags

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/ ... shing.film

The tunnel-boring machines used on London's underground railways were even dubbed 'Fat Slugs' by the workforce as a kind of tribute. You won't find any reference to this in the very 'respectable' websites devoted to the machines, which do in fact inform us that each of them has been named after some high-achieving woman from British History (not sure why all the machines are regarded as females), the latest being 'Helen' and 'Amy'.

https://londonist.com/london/transport/ ... -extension

I would just love it (as Kevin Keegan might have said), if by some extraordinary lapse of taste, or maybe just out of a contrarian sense of humour, a couple of the machines in the future were to be dubbed 'Sandra and Tracey'.

I felt a bit sad, by the way, on reading that one machine (named 'Victoria', after Queen Victoria), was lying in pieces on a workshop floor after being dismantled.

https://www.apm.org.uk/news/crossrail-t ... al-london/