I was chatting with some students yesterday about their names (spelling of last name, origin of first name, etc.) and I thought it would be an interesting study to look at how people get their first names.

For example, one student said she was named after a song that her parents liked. Another’s first name was a family surname.

How do we decide names?

It would be interesting to survey a large number of people and ask about how their parents (or whoever) named them. There might be a correlation to gender, or a trend based on age. I bet it would be fascinating.

Maybe I’ll make a Google Form and ask on Twitter.

I had another thought, which came from a map I saw once showing the locations of tweeters across the globe in real time (I forget the site now). I wondered if certain topics were more likely to be blogged about or tweeted about at certain times of the day because of geographical popularity. For example, I wonder if ukuleles are blogged about more during Hawaii’s evening than other countries’ evenings. Hmm.