Alexander Bentley, of University College, London, and his colleagues are studying the mathematics of cultural transmission. For this sort of work, birth records—which contain every instance in a country of one sort of cultural object, namely people's first names—are a particularly good source of data.
Dr Bentley looked at the frequencies of different first names in American babies. One of his findings was that the “mutation rate” in names is higher for girls than for boys. Parents, in other words, are more liable to be inventive when choosing a name for a baby girl. The researchers have found that for every 10,000 daughters born in America there is an average of 2.3 new names. For sons, the figure is 1.6.
Dr Bentley is not sure why this is the case. One possibility is that in a society where family names are inherited patrilineally, parents feel constrained by tradition when it comes to choosing first names for their sons. As a result, boys often end up with the names of their ancestors. But when those same parents come to choose names for their daughters, they feel less constrained and more able to choose based on style and beauty.
Well, that still doesn't explain Apple. Re Apple, it's less helpful than US Magazine which said on the cover it was going to explain the name, which led me to pick up the magazine, check the index, look for page 34 (hard to do because these ad-filled magazines have very few pages with numbers on them), only to find this quote from Paltrow's husband: "We thought it was a cool name."
And not only doesn't The Economist explain "Apple," it is nerdily obtuse about why people give more weird names to girls. Obviously, it's the same reason men keep wearing gray suits decade after decade while women wear all sorts of colors, patterns, and styles. Back in the 60s I seriously thought that was going to change. (And I'm finding it too hard to get a good link to pictures of extremely mod "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and completely hippie men's fashions.) But it hasn't. Despite the gay rights movement--it all boils down to: fear of looking gay.
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