Study: Keyboards Are Influencing Baby Names | Hacker News Reader

Study: Keyboards Are Influencing Baby Names

time.com

14 pointspwrfid11 comments

I think this study fails to give serious thought to the phonetic differences of the left-side and right-side letters, and the possibilities for co-correlation there.

The right side has 4 out of 6 of the vowels and 3 out of 4 of the other sonorants, which could easily be argued to be the more sonorous or pleasing sounds in a word. 7 out of the 11 right-hand letters fall into one of those categories.

By contrast, the left side is only 3/15 sonorants. Further, the left side has all the sibilants and a strong majority of the stops.

Pointing out that right-side letters correlate with agreeability is an interesting finding. Claiming that which side of the keyboard the letters are on is the _causal_ factor for agreeability strikes me as lazy.

I would be very interested in seeing the stats. I am much less interested in reading the hand-wavey pseudo-explanation which feels like speculative rationalisation instead of science.

"i lack imagination. At least, that's what my two children 'qwerty' and 'F12' tell me" -- Milton Jones.

The paper is linked from the article: http://casasanto.com/geoffbrookshire/papers/CasasantoJasminB.... I think your dismissal of the article is perhaps a little too harsh; for a popular report on a study, it's better than the median we see here.

Yes, I was perhaps a bit harsh.

Are there enough YC company names to repeat this result with statistical meaning?

I wonder if there is any correlation between domain name prices and the QWERTY effect?

True, probably not truthiness without statistics. However, I think a richer vein of correlation is probably to be found with internet nick names and email names. Here very few people go for very long nick names that are variants of their surname (however I am sure that 'bartholemew_simpson_1986@hotmail.com' probably exists).

P.S. This is the internet, not Saturday afternoon on Radio 4 - they won't get the Milton Jones reference, and if they did, they would not get the humour.

I don't know who 'they' are, any more than I know who Milton Jones is, but I got the humour.

Anecdotally, all of my children have names with more letters from the right side of the keyboard - but I'm left handed.

Little Bobby Tables [0], anyone?

[0]: http://xkcd.com/327/

I am right handed and for me the left keys are the positive ones because they come first; in other words the writing system makes the left side dominant for everything writing/reading related.

Anyone for Qwerty? Tyuiop? Qaz? I prefer Wert myself.

Just so long as no one starts using Asdf as a first name. I've always found it irritating and overly pretentious on the part of the parents when surnames are repurposed as given names.

Wert thou jesting, sir?

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