{"id":10559,"date":"2014-10-24T16:23:14","date_gmt":"2014-10-24T20:23:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=10559"},"modified":"2014-10-24T18:19:23","modified_gmt":"2014-10-24T22:19:23","slug":"baby-name-to-discuss-reagan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2014\/10\/24\/baby-name-to-discuss-reagan\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Name to Discuss: Reagan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wednesday’s post<\/a> set off a bit of a flurry of comments section about the possible political nature of the name Reagan, and whether that association was positive or negative. Many of us are interested to know if the associations (the political ones and also the positive\/negative ones) are tied to age, political affiliation, and location.<\/p>\n

I thought about making a poll that would take all that into account, but just imagine the size of it: even if we limited it to age and location, age x location<\/em> is a lot of poll options. Polls work best if they ask one basic question: as soon as we try to make them answer two or more questions (especially if either\/both of those questions have many possible answers), we run into trouble.<\/p>\n

Besides, although it would be interesting to know how a person’s age or politics or home state affected their feelings about a name, that isn’t really what we want to know on a baby name blog: what we want to know is how the name will be perceived by the population at large. We don’t necessarily care what issues are behind the reasons individual strangers feel the way they do: what we want to know is whether that feeling is likely to be held by a large majority, a slim majority, a minority, a very small minority, etc., and how it might affect a person with that name. ANY name will have a bad association for at least a very small minority of people (“Ug, that’s my ex’s name,” “I had a bad co-worker\/teacher\/classmate with that name,” “That was the name of our town’s petty criminal”), so what we want to know is if the level of bad association has reached the point where we no longer feel we want our child to have to deal with that association.<\/p>\n

Another question to ask is whether the general public would transfer that negative association to the person with the name. If a child is given the name of my terrible ex-boyfriend or a city\/actor\/celebrity\/politician I hate, it might give me a little flinch—but do I have a long-term negative impression of the CHILD and his FAMILY, or not? This will vary all the way from “Absolutely” to “Absolutely not,” and it deals with the future predicted feelings of strangers so it’s not a question with an actual answer. The purpose of the exercise is to get a feeling for how serious we think the particular issue might be: to get an idea of the extremes, first try asking it of yourself with the name John (or any very common name), and then with the name Adolf. Try it with the name of a politician you admire, and with the name of a politician you can’t stand. Try it with the name of an author\/actor you admire, and then with the name of one you can’t stand. My guess is that you will come away from this exercise with two feelings: (1) “Boy, there is just NO WAY to know whether it will affect the child: people feel so differently about different names\/associations!” and (2) “But I feel more certain about some names than about others.”<\/p>\n

So here is what we will do. We will have a poll that asks only one question: whether the specific association of former U.S. president Ronald Reagan affects the poll-voter’s feelings about the name Reagan positively, negatively, or neutrally. If people would like to leave further information in the comments about how they believe their age, politics, interests, or location affected their vote, they may.<\/p>\n

I don’t think it would be productive or useful, however, to turn this into a detailed discussion of Ronald Reagan’s presidency or personality. This is a baby name blog, and what we are interested in here is not his presidency or personality per se, but only how it affects the current usage of a name that was his famous surname. I suggest that mentions of Ronald-Reagan-related like\/dislike or agreement\/disagreement be limited to the existence and strength of those feelings, without the details of precisely which policies or actions or traits contributed to those feelings. I also suggest that as much as possible we speak only for ourselves, rather than for others in our area, age range, social circle, or political group.<\/p>\n

[yop_poll id=”60″]<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wednesday’s post set off a bit of a flurry of comments section about the possible political nature of the name Reagan, and whether that association was positive or negative. Many of us are interested to know if the associations (the political ones and also the positive\/negative ones) are tied to age, political affiliation, and location. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-to-consider"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2Kj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10559"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10567,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10559\/revisions\/10567"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}