View Message

This is a reply within a larger thread: view the whole thread

Re: Why are some names submitted several times but deleted several times?
Those in particular will have been deleted because they are not actual names. ‘Unknown’ is literally what gets written down if the parents haven’t chosen a name, or the baby died without being named; it’s not a given name. You see ‘Unnamed’, ‘Boy’, ‘Girl’, ‘Male’, ‘Female’ etc turning up in name data for the same reason.Christop is also not a real name, it’s just what you get if badly coded name lists truncate long names (in this case, Christopher).
https://nanowrimo.org/participants/christine-seaforth-finch
http://christineseaforthfinch.blogspot.com/

This message was edited 5/4/2021, 11:42 PM

vote up4vote down

Replies

I find it funny that 5 boys were named "Female" in 1989 - https://www.behindthename.com/top/beyond.php?name=Female&gender=m&type=sample

This message was edited 5/8/2021, 4:53 PM

vote up2vote down
Data sets inevitably contain errors of all kind, ticking the wrong sex mark is one of the more frequent errors to encounter.
vote up2vote down
Brief autobiography: I had my first child in the UK and wanted to get home as soon as possible after the birth. It would have taken too long to put him on my passport, so he had to get one of his own. We didn't know the sex. My husband made the plane booking at the South Africa end, and I took a phone call from the London agency: bright-sounding lady wanted to know the sex and name. I said "I'm afraid I don't know: it hasn't been born yet" and the sparkle went out of her voice! Naming was easy, passport was issued with no trouble and a very short wait, but on the air ticket for my son, who has three given names, there were what looked like three initials: INF Lastname. INF was of course short for Infant. And I amused myself during the long flight by making them initials instead - I think I settled on Ignatius Neville Ferdinand. So, yeah, I'm glad it wasn't UNK Lastname, which would have been just as possible.
vote up2vote down
Yes, indeed. In some states I used to get data from, "Baby" would look like it would be on the top 50 list of names for newborns because of certificates being issued before the child was named. And in at least one state "Expired" turned up on the baby name list because that's what was written on the certificates of unnamed stillborn infants.
vote up1vote down