The past week or so, whatever time off work I had left was spent on watching The West Wing on DVD. In one of the episodes, the Special Prosecutor on the Josh Bartlet MS inquiry recited the names in the list of individuals that will be subpoenaed in the investigation. It hit me as odd that all ten (10) people on the list had three names - two first names and a surname.

Then something occurred to me. In this day and age when there are nearly 6 billion people on the planet, there is a need to increase the ‘uniqueness’ of names of people for identification purposes. George Washington would not have been easily confused with someone else because there are probably just one or two George Washingtons in his time. However, these days who knows many Ariel Sagums are in the world- or worse John Smiths?

The issue can be remedied by using uncommon names It is not probably a bad idea that Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes named their daughter Suri or that Brad and Angelina named theirs Shiloh.

Another way to make names unique is to increase the number of elements in it (i.e. lengthen the name). I’m sure my future sons and daughters would have more difficulty writing their names in 1st grade but it is a price to worth paying. Think Millenium Bug.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 15th, 2007 at 1:57 pm and is filed under Foresight, General, Milestones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.