is Michael. And my name is Kevin.

Names.

Humans give each other names

but so do dolphins. They use

whistle sounds and will respond to their whistle name

even when produced by a dolphin they don't know.

Personal names, personalized

things, signifying that the named thing is capable of

feeling. That it's worthy of empathy. The United Nations

Convention on the Rights of the Child has declared that every

human child born on earth has the right

to a name. Every country on earth has ratified the treaty,

except for three: South Sudan, the newest country on earth,

Somalia, which has no central government, and

the United States. Why?

Well, some organizations

inside the United States believe that the US

shouldn't have to listen to another authority and the treaty prohibits

the death penalty for children.

It's a moot point now but up until 2005 twenty-two states

allowed children to be executed

for crimes. The United States follows the treaty now but won't promise to

always do so. Dunce is

a bad name to be called but an even worse name

to be the origin of. Meet Duns

Scotus, born in 1266.

Popular in his time, later scholars looked down on his teachings as

clever but wrong. They were so critical, in fact, they took

Duns and turned his name into a noun meaning

a stupid person - a dunce.

Perhaps you'd rather have had the longest name

ever. A record held by a man born in 1904 whose name was 746 letters

long. You can listen to someone pronounce the entire name

on Wikipedia. What can't

a name be? Mononymous people only use

one name. You can name your kid Apple or

North or Moon Unit. You can name your kid

Football. But not everywhere. Some countries require parents to submit

their children's names to the government

for approval. New Zealand enforces a policy in which names

must not cause offence to a reasonable person,

not be unreasonably long and should not resemble an official title

or rank. For example, their courts recently forbid a mother

from naming her child "Sex Fruit."

But New Zealand has allowed some unusual names.

Right now, in New Zealand, there are children living

whose names are officially "Violence," "Midnight Chardonnay"

and "Number 16 Bus Shelter."

In 1996 a Swedish couple submitted their child's name

for official approval, "Albin." But in protest of the naming laws in place at

the time,

they spelled Albin like this

It wasn't accepted.

In the United States you can name your kid pretty much anything that doesn't

include obscenity,

numerals or symbols, which means, as Carlton Larson points out,

you can't name your kid R2-D2.

But you could, say, name your child

Adolf Hitler, which Heath and Deborah Campbell

did in 2006. Adolf Hitler Campbell

made headlines in 2009 after a bakery refused to put his name

on a cake for his third birthday. Shortly afterwards

child welfare officials took him and his other controversially named siblings away

from their parents and place them in foster care,

where they remain to this day. His parents are self-identified

Nazis and they live in

New Jersey, the latter of which makes them New Jerseyans.

If they lived in Kansas they'd be Kansan, if they lived in New York they'd

be New Yorkers, if they lived in Utah they'd be

Utahns. A name based on where something is from

is called a demonym, which means that even names

have names. An endonym is a name given to a place

by those who live there. An exonym is the name given to a place by those

who live elsewhere. But my favorite name for a name

is an autoantonym. A word that can mean the

opposite of its other meaning. For example,

the word "off," which can mean both

activated and de-activated.

For instance, the alarm went off,

so we had to turn it off.

You can track the distribution of your last name across the entire

earth using the public profiler.

Or visualize the popularity of the US' top

1000 names over time. Studies have shown that your name

may influence your behavior.

The name–letter effect is a phenomenon in which people prefer

words, events, other people and places,

which contain letters similar to the letters inside their own

name. Measuring a person's preference for such letters

has been shown to be a good gauge of self-esteem.

Richard Wiseman's Quirkology is a great read on this topic. He mentions

"alphabetical discrimination." People with last names that begin with the letter

near the end of the alphabet tend to rate themselves

significantly less successful than people with names that begin with the

letter near the

beginning of the alphabet. Perhaps because

all their lives they've been put on the bottom

of lists. Also fascinating is the fact that men and women with

positive initials, like "A.C.E.,"

"H.U.G." or "J.O.Y."

live 3 to 4.5 years longer

than average. But men with negative initials, like

"P.I.G.," "B.U.M." or "D.I.E."

die about three years

earlier than average. But interestingly, women with negative initials

don't show much difference. Half of all

Americans share the same 1,712

last names. 1 percent of Americans have the last name

Smith. In China, 85%

share the same 100 last names. Two-hundred last names cover 96% of the population

in Vietnam, 40% of which have the same

last name.

This one.

Name Colleen can hurt people's feelings. It's at the very bottom

of Graham's hierarchy of disagreement. And, at the end of the day,

names are just words. As the saying goes,

sticks and stones may break my bones but words are merely the smallest element of

language capable of

containing meaning and isolation and, as such, could never directly produce the 4,000

newtons

of force per square centimetre required to break bones.

And as always,

thanks for watching.