Demetria Glace writes:
I wasn’t the first to make the connection, but once I noticed it, it was everywhere. You walk past a poster for a new movie and think, Why is every action hero named Jack, John, James, or, occasionally, Jason?
I turned to my friends and colleagues, asking desperately if they had also noticed this trend, as I made my case by listing off well-known characters: John Wick, Jason Bourne, Jack Reacher, John McClane, James Bond, Jack Bauer, and double hitter John James Rambo. . . .
As a data researcher, I [Glace] had to get to the bottom of it. What followed was months of categorizing hundreds of action movies, consulting experts in the field of name studies, reviewing academic papers and name databases, and seeking interviews with authors and screenwriters as to the rationale behind their naming decisions. . . .
Good stuff. It’s fun to see a magazine article with the content of a solid blog post.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy reading magazines. But magazine articles, even good magazine articles, follow a formula: they start off with a character and maybe an anecdote, then they ease into the main topic, they follow through with a consistent story, ending it all with a pat summary. By contrast, a blog post can start anywhere, go wherever it wants, and, most importantly, does not need to come to a coherent conclusion. The above-linked article on hero names was like that, and I was happy to see it running in Slate.
I’m imagining an update to the Oscar Wilde play called The Importance of Being Jacked. Perhaps starring Billy Bob Thornton.
Perhaps somebody can do a good search for action hero names, but I’ll offer some background variation. Looking at the total number of babies named with Jack, John, James or Jason vs those named with Bill, Bob or David, the former category is consistently larger than the latter every year from 1910 to 2022. For example, in 2022 there were 31,465 babies in the US born with the J names and 7748 with the B&D names. Indeed, the ratio appears to be at least 3:1 in all years, and much larger in the earlier years. That difference does not extend to all names beginning with the letters J, B, or D. J names slightly exceed B or D names from 1910 until just after WWII, then there is a surge of B&D names until round 1970, and then J becomes more popular (but the difference appears to be decreasing with 2022 being close to equal). If I could post an image, these observations would be much clearer of course.
In any case, I think the particular names for action heroes would need to be evaluated against the background frequency of those names (probably names are better than letters) in the population. And the only data I have is from the US – but action heroes are predominantly American aren’t they?
Now that I read the original column, I see that Glace indeed does compare the computation of action hero names with the population names (for the US). Good work.
It seems a little funny that the major counterexample — Mission: Impossible’s Ethan Hunt — didn’t get mentioned!
Indiana Jones and Luke Skywalker, too.
Still, there’s definitely something here worth thinking about.
I suppose it’s worth noting that the name James Bond, for the main character of a plurality of the action movies ever made, was chosen precisely because it was so bland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspirations_for_James_Bond
But of course there are plenty of other bland names that don’t start with J, so it’s not like this explains why John McClane was selected instead of Dave McClane or whatever.
The premise is about the names of singular action heroes who are the sole protagonist of their films:
So that probably eliminates both Ethan Hunt and Luke Skywalker, though it would probably allow Indiana Jones.
Of course, once you get past the somewhat click-bait-y title, the actual trend turns out to be “33% of lone action heroes have names beginning with J” — which contrasts with the 17 most popular J names making up only 12% of the US population in the past 100 years.
…Jones
…Jedi
I presume that this is at least somewhat a propos of M:I DR I. Should note that the hero’s name in that is Ethan.
It would kind of defeat the purpose of having a name if every other guy was called John Johnson. I think something more interesting was going on there.
Perhaps they all put their names down as John Thomas, and the women were Lady Jane.
1/3 of South Koreans have the family name Kim or Lee (or, really, 김, 이 , or 리 , the latter two being different characters that sound very similar and that we would transliterate as Lee or Li or Ri).
But the reason for a “given” first name is to distinguish between multiple people with the same family name.
If 46% were named John in Essex county at that time, then how did they reliably distinguish between male siblings/cousins? Maybe it was nicknames, middle names, mostly only the first-born was named John. Or maybe the names given to the tax collector were inaccurate, or the collectors themselves duplicated data to meet some quota.
I just think something more interesting was going on at the time to result in that data. Not that I don’t believe it could happen. I grew up around so many Dan/Kates that the first name alone was essentially unusable. But it wasn’t near 50%, the problems arise after only a few people with the same name.
Re: But the reason for a “given” first name is to distinguish between multiple people with the same family name.
I thought it was the other way around. People had (first) names, and to distinguish between the numeurous Jacks, one would be called Jack (the) Brewer, the other Jack (the) Smith or Jack of Buckingham. As trades and manors ran in families it stuck.
Just something appealing about J’s
There was a WWII action movie (1955) To Hell and Back with an action hero named Audie Murphy—played by the actor and songwriter Audie Murphy whose WWII experiences were the basis for the movie.
Bob76
Turning from in-action heroes to the less fortunately named, there is the classic purveyor of failure, Willy Loman who is not even “Just a Bill” of Dave Frishberg fame. And, never let us forget Ken, Karl and Kyle who strike out excessively because of the “K.”
Actually, forget about that “K” baseball stuff because it was due to an incorrect calculation.
“J” has a good jump-off sound to it for a name. That is why “Jehovah” is so much better than the wimpy “Yahweh” that liberal theologians like to say is how the name of God is pronounced. (It’s YHWH in Hebrew, with the consonants lost to memory, where Y is usually anglicized to J as in Jonah and W is anglicized to V as in David.) Yason, Yames, Indiana Yones, etc. just wouldn’t work.
It just happens I wrote up an email on first names for my lunch group today. See the link in it for excerpts from several academic and non-academic studies. Our focus was on which first names help you earn a higher salary.
“I just did some looking into the first-name literature, which actually seems quite large. We talked about the Bertrand-Mullanaithan article at lunch last week and whether it was evidence of racism. It seems to be a standard finding that people with unusual, unique, names tend to end up worse and people with common, boring, names end up better. Bertrand-Mullanaithan didn’t take that into account. If your parents give you a strange name, they probably also were somewhat odd in other ways, which is usually bad. Also, if you have a peculiar first name and you don’t use just your first initial instead on your resume, that says something about you.”
https://www.rasmusen.org/rasmapedia/index.php?title=Names
I think you mean the vowels have been lost. But my favorite theory is that the pronunciation of the H has changed. At the time it was pronounced as a “k” or “ch”. So it sounded more like “yakwech”, which is actually unpronounceable. Essentially Moses asked God’s name and heard something like a radio squelch, which human voices cannot mimic accurately:
https://www.soundsnap.com/tags/radio_squelch
Similar to how we now have the Yucatan peninsula because when the Spanish asked the locals where they were the response was “I don’t understand you”, which sounded like yucatan.
Maybe ancient aliens, or some preppers who survived a global catastrophe and managed to emerge with technology intact, or it is totally wrong. But it is an entertaining idea.
I don’t know how I failed to include the endless-loop song:
“My name is Yon Yohnson
I live in Visconsin
I work in the lumberyards there.
Whenever I meet
A new girl the street
And she asks me my name then I say, …
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvu2Ds5RSnI has poet Carl Sandburg singing his version of it in 1958
I approach the study of first names with caution. It is a high-dimensional problem because we have to take into account that each name has its own associations. We put them into classes without any evidence that the results are meaningful: The meaningfulness of the class input variable is an assumption we make (are we creating meaningless means?).
I am not convinced by claims that such and such names lead to higher incomes. There may be some name discrimination, but I expect the effect to be tiny, around zero (after accounting for all other confounding variables).
Assuming homogeneity of effect for an individual name seems a bit of a stretch to me. Last week I heard a presentation which concluded that firms discriminate when the labour market allows it. That sounds reasonable to me (although the empirical work did not convince me).
Another thing that makes me sceptical is the assumption of time invariance of the effect of these names. The article Andrew refers to above cites a study of name effects from the 1960s. Even if the design had been flawless (I have not checked), there is no evidence that the attitudes measured then would still be the same today. I highly doubt it.
May I suggest a different approach to such analysis? One can use unsupervised learning techniques to cluster the data generated and then find the pattern of what connects these names. This allows a more detailed analysis of the name. In the context of movie hero names, my approach would even allow us to go beyond the action movie genre.
Final note: There is an undeniable selection bias (even acknowledged by the original author) towards more successful, better funded films in the data.
For real final note: I hope I am not stepping on anyone’s toes. This is supposed to be a light-hearted, fun piece of research, and I am starting to pick holes in it. I appreciate the effort!
It’s not just action heroes! It turns out to also be true for New York Prison Employees that have had disciplinary cases. The 4 listed J names account for 298 out of 4947 people involved in disciplinary cases over the 2010-2020 time period, while the B&D names only account for 87 people. Are we missing some commonality between action heroes and misbehaving prison employees? My imagination begins to run wild. But perhaps it has something to do with shark attacks…
From OP:
Your 6% (being the top 4 J names) seems lower than expected from the general population.
There is an ethnic divergence between the general population and the prison guard population as well. I think I’ll stop there.
Jeffs need better agents.
Well the important subcategory of ‘naval thinking men of action’ (see e.g. Cmdr. James Bond, Capt. James Kirk, Capt. Jack Aubrey) starts with/is defined by Odysseus.
Don’t forget Popeye!
Or every male hunk character on soap opera named Chase or Chance? But never Norman, or Herb.