Name meme (I got it from bloodyaussie)

[go_team]

Just in case you were wondering:

Tracy is the #291 most common male name.
0.048% of men in the US are named Tracy.
Around 58800 US men are named Tracy!

Tracy is the #108 most common female name.
0.197% of females in the US are named Tracy.
Around 251175 US females are named Tracy!

Tracy is the #1082 most common last name.
0.011% of last names in the US are Tracy.
Around 27500 US last names are Tracy!
source: namestatistics.com

Isn't that interesting? Actually, I think it's kind of weird that they separated names into "male" and "female" but then go on to say that men are named X but females are named X. I care entirely too much about stupid little inconsistencies like that, really I do.

Comments

[boojum.livejournal.com]

I wonder if it's related to the "woman" as adjective trend? I've fairly often seen "There are woman engineers and male engineers" and similar things.

[goteam.livejournal.com]

All I know is, it's inconsistent and it bugs me. If they'd said, "X percent of all women in the US" or "X percent of all males in the US", that'd be okay. But the mix-and-match doesn't work for me.

The "'woman' as adjective" thing kinda bugs me, and I'm not sure why. Possibly for the same reason it's dumb to separate writers into "poets" and "poetesses" --- unless you have a very specific reason for needing to mention gender, calling Emily Dickinson a "woman poet" or "poetess" both reinforces the idea that masculine is generic, and implies that yeah, she was an okay poet... for a woman.

[boojum.livejournal.com]

*nod* Aviatrix and so forth. I've mostly seen "woman" as an adjective in direct opposition to "male" in the same position, though. I wonder if it's a fumbled attempt at a lack of sexism: "We have woman poets and we have mustn't say 'real', what can I put here? male poets." Sort of that "woman" and "lady" have been used as (usually diminutive) adjectives, but "man" and "gentleman" haven't, so the speaker turns to ordinary English rules and pulls out the real adjective "male".

Hmm. That doesn't explain your original example, though. Any chance they were doing something bizarre, like having records for girl children but not for boy children? Or female aliens? (Our records show that Xsdjfk is the 430th most common name among Jovians....)

[coldtortuga.livejournal.com]

That website only uses "men" in one place -- in the results returned by the search-script. On the home-page and the FAQ, "male" and "female" are used consistently.

So, why does "men" get used in one line of code of the php script?

I suggest that it's an artifact, just something that slipped through the debugging process. I doubt the author is particularly interested in the actual results, and instead spent lots of spare time tinkering just trying to get it to work. Any outputs (considering it's coded in php) would be an afterthought.

Maybe email the author and point it out as a "bug" :-)

[goteam.livejournal.com]

It does strike me as a typo (easiest explanation, yaddy yadda). Maybe I'll go exploit my copious free time at the poor sap who gets bug emails about that page. Mwah ha hah!

[iainuki.livejournal.com]

Almost certainly not. The data appears to be from this US Census page, and there's no distinction between male/female there. My guess is with the others below, that this is a bug.

The use of female variations on presumptively male titles has fallen by the wayside, as far as I can tell. I've rarely seen titles like "aviatrix" or "poetess" in anything written in say, the past twenty years, unless the author was making a point about the existence of such titles. There are certain variations that have gotten grandfathered in, like prince/princess or hero/heroine. These are the exceptions, though, not the rule.

It's also worthwhile noting that the origin of these titles is not only sexism, but also slavish devotion to classical forms. Latin, along with many of the other Romance languages, assigns a gender to all words in the language. Adjectives take the gender of the nouns they modify. Certain English-speakers decided, for reasons that escape me, that a similar schema should be applied to English, and you can observe that certain of the forms are explicitly Latinate in origin (aviatrix). Thus, these rules share a common origin with many other stupid grammar rules in English, like the rule against splitting an infinitive.

[amoken.livejournal.com]

Yeah that kinda tripped me up into wondering if they didn't count boys but did count girls. I wonder if they did a search and replace by eye rather than by tool and just missed "men".

There are only twice as many Thorsons as Thorsens in the US. So why the heck does everyone always try to spell it with an 'o' and get all surprised that there could possibly be an 'e' there? Must be the prominence of Johnson and such (2ish mil vs 5K Johnsens).