taken from UrbanBaby.com

Choose the Wrong Name, Doom Your Kid
July 20, 2009; 6:00 am by Joyce Slaton


Most modern parents don’t want to give their newborn baby boy a ho-hum average name like David or Michael. They long for something different, something with snap, something that will let everyone know that little Dash or Ajax is someone to be reckoned with. But a new study claims that giving a baby boy an unusual name can cast a pall on his future.

In the professional journal Social Science Quarterly, Shippensburg University professor David Kalist says giving newborn boys unusual or “girlie” first names makes them more likely to land in jail. Kalist and his associate, Daniel Lee looked at 15,000 names given to baby boys between 1987 and 1991. The more unusual the name, the more likely that boy is to commit a crime.

In alphabetical order, the Top 10 “bad boy” names, according to Kalist, are Alec, Ernest, Garland, Ivan, Kareem, Luke, Malcolm, Preston, Tyrell and Walter.

Now, this doesn’t mean naming your child Luke automatically means he’ll end up in the clink. Why the association between weird names and crime? For one thing, prior studies have shown that the more education a set of parents have, the less likely they are to choose very unpopular names. Parents with more education also tend to have more money, and poorer people tend to commit crimes more often. There are also other corroborating studies: “a 1993 study that showed boys who have strange spellings of common first names (Patric, Geoffrey) are less likely to be upstanding and successful; a 2001 study showing that boys are judged for their moral character and masculinity by their first names; and a University of Michigan study that stated, ‘having an unusual first name leads to unfavorable reactions in others, which then leads to unfavorable evaluations of the self.’”

Be that as it may, unusual names and kreative spellings are getting more popular. Aiden, Hayden, Caden, and Jackson were all amongst the Top 10 names for newborn boys in 2008: and “John,” once top of the pack, is now a pathetic 44th most popular.