Obviously

April 4, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

We sociologists don’t get much respect.

Duncan Watts, in a Scientific American Q & A, describes how other people’s perceptions of him changed when he left physics/math and got into sociology – good-bye Einstein, hello Rodney Dangerfield:

I started out life in physics and then mathematics, and at some point I switched over to become a sociologist—and in the process of transitioning, I noticed this interesting phenomenon: When people perceived me as a mathematician, and I would describe my research, they would say, "Wow, that's really fascinating. How do you figure these things out? It's complicated and difficult." But when a few years later I was describing the same work in terms of social phenomena and the behavior of people, fads and historical events, success and failure, and so on, people would say, "That sounds kind of obvious. Don’t we all know that?"

It’s probably because we study people. Everybody has a working theory– probably several theories – about why people do what they do. Those ideas are dime a dozen. Ah, but scientists . . .

When someone tries to explain to us how electrons behave, we think it’s amazing and completely unintuitive, but when we explain how people behave, it always seems trivial.

I’m not familiar with Watts’s work. Sight unseen I’m fairly sure I don’t have the math chops to handle much of it (the library call number prefixes on his earlier books are QA, not HM). It’s about social influence and networks – he takes issue with some of the “tipping point” and “small world” models. I might have better luck with his new book (published, less dauntingly, by Crown Business), Everything Is Obvious:* *Once You Know the Answer

Names -- Traditional or Trendy

April 4, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

I suspect the recent upsurge in Old Testament names for boys expresses not so much a religious sentiment as it does a desire to be different but not too different. This trend towards trendiness and away from tradition isn’t just an American thing. It’s also true in France, where parents have had a free choice of names for less than 20 years. Before that, there was a government-approved list parents had to choose from.

The government still offers new arrivals some advice on names. Bapiste Coulmont links to a list of “French” names the government recommends to immigrants who want to become French – a process called “francisation.”* The list has about 400 names that are “French or currently used in France.”

But the French themselves don’t seem to have much use for that list. When I checked the most popular names that actual French parents were giving their newborns (the most recent year I could get was 2006), for both boys and girls, three of the top ten names were not on the list of “French” names.

Enzo (1)	Ines (7)
Nathan (4)	Jade (9)
Tom (8)	Lola (10)

From what I understand, other unlisted names – Margaux, Apolline, and Victoria – have since climbed into France’s top ten.

Japan too. Several decades ago, when I was in Japan, nearly all girls’ names ended in either ko (子), a few in mi (美) or e (江). Now none of the popular girls’ names have these endings.

The trend isn’t universal. In Italy, all the top names are traditionally Italian.** Joseph and Mary (Giuseppe and Maria) top the list.

* The counterpart of Americanization. When the movie “The Americanization of Emily” was released in 1964, that name wasn’t even in the top 250, but the title was prescient. Thirty-two years later, Emily had climbed to #1, and she held that spot for over a decade.

** Italy has no list of approved names. But the law does allow a civil official to “advise and dissuade overly-creative parents” who propose names that are “ridiculous, shameful, or embarrassing.” (A newspaper article on this is here.) In the US, you can name your daughter Brooklyn no questions asked. But in Italy, tying to name your kid Testaccio might not go so smoothly.

Defectors

April 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

After putting up the previous post, I wondered if maybe there actually had been some Moussa Koussa jokes. So I check Andy Borowitz’s tweets. Borowitz is a funny guy (one of today’s tweets:

“What does Fox News do on April Fool's Day?” is a question akin to “What do slutty nurses do on Halloween?”

In fact, he did have some Koussa tweets, but they were mostly jokes about the name, not the man. For example,

Gaddafi Replaces Moussa Koussa with New Foreign Minister, Banana Fanna

Now, here’s the sociological connection. Andy Borowitz was a sociology researcher. Well, not quite. But he appears in the initial footnote of a classic article, Wendy Griswold’s “American Character and the American Novel” (AJS 1981).

The indefatigable research team consisted of Andy Borowitz . . . .

Clearly, Borowitz coulda been a contender. Instead, he turned his back on sociological research (maybe he wasn’t all that indefatigable after all) and went with comedy. I guess it was a choice between sending out reprints or cashing in residuals. In Hollywood, he created “Fresh Prince,” which ran for six seasons and is probably still being recycled today somewhere on cable.

'Taint Funny, Moussa

April 1, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

Moussa Koussa, the newly defective foreign minister of Libya, was a sociology major at Michigan State.

My first reaction was that this was a set-up line waiting for a punch line. But it’s not funny, and it’s not an April Fool thing. This guy was involved in some very nasty stuff – assassinations of Libyan exiles, probably Lockerbie and perhaps another airplane bombing. (Video of old TV news stories is here.)