BROADWAY + COLFAX
A mile high and an inch deep. Internet home of @BROFAX aka Eric Lubbers.
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Presidential Name Battle™
Presidents! They’re just like us! They sometimes have really weird first names.
I made a Millard Fillmore joke on Twitter this morning it got me thinking. Was anyone so inspired by the Compromise of 1850 that they actually named their kid Millard? Did anyone ever lapse in judgement for so long that they yoked their actual flesh and blood forever with a name that sounds like a sick duck or a rustic French entrée (or the latter made from the former)?
Thanks to Wolfram|Alpha, the Greatest Website™, I know that not only did some poor folks end up with the name Millard, but that here in 2012 aka The Future there are still an estimated 7,724 Millards still living in the United States! Sure, their average age is 68, but still, that’s about 7,720 more Millards than I thought I’d find.
Extending the same treatment to some other presidential names of varying weirdness (the weirdest three - Rutherford, Lyndon and Barack - unfortunately didn’t register at all) there were some interesting groupings.
The 1920s
The slightly less weird (Warren, Calvin, Herbert) were the clear winners out of my sampling, each hitting well over 100,000 still alive in the U.S., with Calvin coming out on top (thanks in part, no doubt, to Bill Watterson).
Dwight
In the middle of the pack was Dwight with 60K (but that could change). Not a bad showing.
A Muppet, a hero and Millard
The bottom tier are Grover, Ulysses and my boy Millard. Grover maintains a slight lead (probably thanks to a Muppet) over Ulysses with around 11,000.
Invasion of the tween Ulysses(es)
One of the cool things WolframAlpha does is give the “most common age” of people with the same first name. As you could imagine, these are old names for old people. For example, the most common age of someone named Herbert? 82 years young. In fact, but for one of the names, the most common age for all of these names is 54 or older.
That one exception is Ulysses, probably the actually oldest name in the list. The most common age of a Ulysses in this country is 12! Twelve years old, as in “born in 2000” and “doesn’t remember 9/11”. I’m assuming that this, like so many things, is the fault of hipsters aging into child-bearing ages. There are 10,000 Ulysseses running around the country and most of them are tweens. Be afraid.
Your turn, lazy.
If you want to play around with your own or any other name(s), this is the search query I used. It’s a lot of a fun and you can find out all sorts of weird incidental information as well, like the fact that an known nickname for Warren is “Woz,” which is great. Have fun. Merry Presidents Day.
¡Viva Millard!
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