Today is the first day of classes, so I’m going to be kind of busy at work. Here’s a bit of pop-culture silliness to lighten things up while I’m teaching and setting up labs.<\/p>\n
The Neil Diamond chestnut “Sweet Caroline” got brought up in a back-channel discussion, prompting much revulsion from the older members of the ScienceBlogs collective. I’m in the age range where the song was just starting to acquire kitsch value, so I don’t really mind it.<\/p>\n
It occurs to me, though, that between Neil Diamond and OutKast (specifically, the song “Roses”), pop music has been pretty rough on people named “Caroline.” Just about the time that the name stops making people remember Neil Diamond, Andre Benjamin comes along and does a total hatchet job on it. I’d feel really sorry for my cousin’s daughter, if I didn’t expect that she’ll kick the ass of anybody who makes fun of her name…<\/p>\n
This makes me wonder, though: What’s the worst name to have, from a pop-culture standpoint? There are lots of songs using specific names, and plenty of other pop-culture ephemera that make life difficult for people with particular names– between Charles Schultz and Jim Croce, anybody with the surname “Brown” needs to be really careful what they name their male children… Some are worse than others, of course– the Tommy Tutone classic “867-5309” probably caused some angst for girls named “Jenny,” but not as much as Prince did for girls named “Nikki” (and Dave Grohl just covered that song, too, which can’t help).<\/p>\n
So who gets the shortest end of the pop-culture stick?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today is the first day of classes, so I’m going to be kind of busy at work. Here’s a bit of pop-culture silliness to lighten things up while I’m teaching and setting up labs. The Neil Diamond chestnut “Sweet Caroline” got brought up in a back-channel discussion, prompting much revulsion from the older members of… Continue reading What’s in a Name?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37,24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop_culture","category-silliness","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/988\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}