Oceane Tide Rising and Falling

June 12, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the previous post on names, I said that the rapid rise and fall of Oceane in France paralleled the career of Madison in the US. But Madison is still hanging in there, still in the top 5, having descended only one or two places in the rankings. A better example might be Hannah (though Oceane doesn’t have Hannah’s history), or Ashley in the late 20th century.

(Click on the graph to see a larger version.)

Still, both these American names were less volatile than Oceane in France. In a single decade (1991-2000) the number of Oceanes increased by a factor of six. Six years later, it had fallen nearly by half.
(US graphs are from babynamewizard. More data on French names here.)

It's How You Finish

June 11, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Flaneuse at Graphic Sociology reprints a neat graph by Baptiste Coulmont showing trends in the endings of girls' names in France.

(Click on the graph to see a larger version.)

The final “e” has long been characteristic of French female names, though with some variation (the “ette” suffix is so 1930s). The most remarkable trend in recent decades is the rise of the final “a” to the point that it is now more common than the final “e.” The three top names in 2006 (the most recent year I could find data for), were Emma, Lea, and Clara. (I also noted that Oceane has now dropped out of the top ten. Apparently, in terms of fashion cycles, Oceane is to France what Madison is to the US.)

Final letters of boys’ names in the US have also seen a dramatic shift, as documented nearly two years ago by Laura Wattenberg at babynamewizard. The half century from 1906 to 1956 saw little change. D,E, S, N, and Y shared the closing spotlight, probably thanks to David, George, and James/Charles/Thomas, John and several Y names.

Final Letter of Boys' Names 1906

Final Letter of Boys' Names 1956

But by 2006, N had conquered the field and stood pretty much alone.

Final Letter of Boys' Names 2006

It won not by having a single blockbuster – only one of the top ten boys’ names, Ethan, had a final N – but with more of a long-tail effect. Of the names ranked 14th to 27th, nine of the fourteen ended in N. (The list is here).

Dialing, Dollars, and Doctors

June 10, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The only health care costs I was thinking about when I started calling orthopedists today were my own. That’s why my first question was to make sure that the doctor participated in my insurance plan. I was calling only orthopedists listed listed on my plan’s website. But the woman who finally answered the phone of my first choice told me No.

The personal is the political, and I started thinking of all those warnings from conservatives that if the government gets into health care, we won’t be able to choose our own doctors, and we’ll be subject to incompetent government bureaucracy. It took only one phone call to discover that under what I have now, I can’t choose my own doctor, and that, at least when it comes to keeping their website information current, the insurance company bureaucracy isn’t exactly a paragon of competence.

A public option might be just as good. And who knows – with Obama in office, maybe the music you have to listen to while you’re waiting will be better.

I expected to be put on hold, and I expected the music. But I wasn’t prepared for the ads over the music – a woman’s reassuring voice telling me about all the wonderful kinds of surgery now available. It wasn’t as blatant as those ads on the subway decades ago for Dr. Tush* and his hemorrhoid surgery. The on-hold message didn’t exactly say, “What would it take for me to put you today into this quick and sporty little arthroscopic hand surgery?” There was also the difference that while the straphanger-friendly proctologist was going for volume, the orthopedists were aiming at a smaller customer base but pushing their more expensive products. Still, it was clear that all these practitioners were paying close attention to the bottom line.

Then I remembered that just this morning, Ezra Klein blogging at WaPo had said something along similar lines – less personal, more political and economic.

Reforms to . . . the way doctors are paid would actually do much to change the drivers of health-care spending. . . . Most doctors are paid on a fee-for-service model. Every time they do something to you, they get money for it. That's a subtle incentive toward expensive overtreatment. Conversely, if we paid doctors exactly the same amount overall, but made that money a yearly salary rather than a reward for volume of treatment, doctors would lose an important incentive to provide more health-care services than we actually need.

Ezra also recommends Atul Gawande’s recent New Yorker article, which ought to be required reading for anybody who has anything to do with healthcare.

* Amazingly, I could not find anything about Dr. Tush on the Internet. I’m pretty sure he wound up in prison, but I don’t know whether for medical or financial malfeasance

Well You Needn't

June 7, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The primary school my son went to is moving, and there was a farewell tour of the old building. The walls were covered with the kids’ art and their class projects. I was looking at the classroom doors – guides to trends in names. Gone were Emily and Alexandra and of course Jason.
But this one stopped me in my tracks.


Thelonius!

“There’s Only One Aretha,” I remembered. It was the title of a chapter in Beyond Jennifer and Jason: An Enlightened Guide to Naming Your Baby, by far the best of the books my wife and I consulted back in the late 80s. (The title has since been updated: Beyond Jennifer & Jason, Madison & Montana: What to Name Your Baby Now.)

Don’t name your kid Aretha – that was the gist of the chapter – unless you want to doom her to a lifetime of predictable comments. There are some names that are unique. There’s only one of them, and it’s been taken.

Surely Thelonius must be such a name – even his son goes by T.S. Monk, Jr. But at least on the West Side, maybe it has broken out.