The Power of Names

It would be interesting to have some kind of statistical information about startup names. There's definitely trends, the "missing vowel" is basically Web 2.0's metal umlaut. But while that might appear trendy at one time, it might almost be a death knell once that style is passé. Coming back to people's names, probably the equivalent of "upper class names" becoming lower class.

Are we back to "John" and "Michael" company/product names again, or is the "Aidan" and "Teagan" phase still going strong?

I speak both English and Chinese. I gave my children both English and Chinese names. It would be a very good idea to try to replicate these preliminary findings across more languages. We can't assume that English-speaking people in developed countries are representative of the whole world.

http://www.psmag.com/magazines/pacific-standard-cover-story/...

Besides the issue of whether or not the findings fit all of humanity rather than just people in some cultures, there is also the issue of whether the findings are even true. A lot of psychologists are discovering that many reported findings on human psychology are not from studies with adequate statistical power to show that the findings are genuine. The more astute psychologists, such as Uri Simonsohn at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School of Business,

http://opim.wharton.upenn.edu/~uws/

are alert now about applying statistical tests to published findings to find out if the findings are really likely given the described experimental conditions, or are the result of "p-hacking" or undisclosed flexibility in data collection and analysis or other researcher behavior that obscures truth-finding.

The author of this brief article has a book coming out, and "is an assistant professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, with an affiliated appointment in the N.Y.U. psychology department." I wonder what he thinks of the work of Simonsohn and Simonsohn's colleagues about testing research findings that make it into the business journals to find out whether or not the findings are even true or generalizable to other cultures.

Maybe people in the northern hemisphere associate going north with going uphill because the climatic changes are similar. For instance you can find plant ecologies at 3,000 feet of elevation in West Virginia that are very similar to what you would find at sea level in eastern Canada.

In countries which their language is based in Chinese, there's a whole branch of theory on how different names affect people's lives. The meaning and sound of each characters and even how many strokes it take to write each character are taken into account.

When I was young, my family lived 200 miles north of my grandpa's town. Whenever grandpa visited us, he insisted that the road north was uphill all the way. I always knew that it was nonsense. After all, we lived in a coastal area, whereas grandpa lived inland (and it was definitely not below sea level), and there are no significant mountain ranges in between, so if anything the drive north should have been mostly downhill. Only later did I realize that the perception of driving uphill probably had something to do with the way most maps are drawn. Grandpa probably did burn more gas on the road north, though, because he didn't have to haul any gifts on the road south.

I read things beginning with gl are correlated with light effects e.g. glisten, glimmer, glitter, gloss, glow.

So I suppose that's why a "glorious day" evokes beaming sun.

Interesting about the north and south discrepancies where they say that property is more valuable on the north side of town. I was just thinking about this in terms of how cities are laid out. The two cities I know are Milwaukee and Chicago and it is pretty obvious that the north sides of each of them are way more affluant than the south. Any other examples of this or am I off base?

Speaking of ways in which our language affects the way we define the world around us, here's a list of Eskimo words for snow names (or rather: lexemes, in the article): http://www.princeton.edu/~browning/snow.html

Some would dispute that there exists a similarly diverse taxonomy of ways to classify snow in English, but I'd argue those rules are looser and more subject to interpretation.

Either way, it's really interesting to learn the ways in which the constructs of our language define the way we see the world. Another example of language influencing thought is the way gender assignments of words affect perceptions of their characteristics as masculine, feminine, or neutral.

I didn't realise Jody was a unisex name

Wall of text. Please, write "tl;dr" somebody.