Splicetoday

Pop Culture
Jul 14, 2009, 09:44AM

No one named Garland has ever been a bad ass

A new study suggests that naming your child something unusual puts them at a higher risk for landing in jail.

I can't possibly see anything wrong with this...

Boys growing up with popular names such as Michael, Joshua and Christopher have a good chance of leading law-abiding lives.But young men named Kareem, Walter or Ivan could run afoul of the law.That's according to a recent US study that claims the more unpopular, uncommon or feminine a boy's first name, the greater the chance he will end up behind bars.While Shippensburg University professor David Kalist's report in Social Science Quarterly shows that "unpopular names are likely not the cause of crime," he explains that factors often associated with those names can "increase the tendency toward juvenile delinquency."Boys with unpopular, girlish or uncommon names often are ridiculed by peers, come from families of low socioeconomic status and face discrimination in the workforce based on a preconceived bias about their names, according to the study, which analysed more than 15,000 names.Jay Corzine, chairman of the University of Central Florida's sociology department, said, "Some kids could have a name that leads to teasing and being picked on and, in return, that child could become aggressive with others."Top 10 bad-boy namesAlec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan, Kareem, Luke, Malcolm, Preston, Tyrell, Walter.

Discussion
  • Seems like racist nonsense to me--Tyrell, Preston, Kareem, Walter--although pity the kid named Herman or Humphrey.

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  • Also, picking two of these names at random gives you a pretty decent futuristic evil corporation CEO name generator: Preston Garland, Ivan Tyrell, Alec Walter (maybe Alec Walter would be the evil CEO's personal assistant).

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