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you had to pick one name in the past couple of years that you were sure would be abandoned, you might pick Katrina. Who on earth would name their baby after a hurricane that nearly wiped out an entire city?
    And indeed, the name did slump in the twelve months following Hurricane Katrina, with only 850 incidences in the U.S. It slipped on the list of girls’ names from number 247 to number 382. That’s a pretty big drop—but why wasn’t the drop even steeper?
    You might think it’s because parents far from the affected areas weren’t all that tuned in to the hurricane and its destruction. If so, you would be wrong.
    In the two states most severely affected by Hurricane Katrina, the name actually received more action in the twelve months following the storm than in the twelve months previous. In Louisiana, the name increased from eight incidencesto fifteen, while in Mississippi, it spiked from seven to twenty-four. (I am guessing that the rate of Katrina namings increased even more, since lots of displaced people from both states were having babies—maybe named Katrina—elsewhere.)
    Maybe new parents in Louisiana named their babies Katrina as affirmation that they’d lived through the storm, a kind of hair-of-the-dog naming treatment. Maybe they named their girls Katrina to commemorate friends or relatives who died or lost their homes. But one thing’s for sure: I don’t know of anyone who would have predicted that there would be more Katrinas in Louisiana and Mississippi after the hurricane. Which says at least as much about our incessant desire to predict the future as it does about the people who had babies last year.
Beat This Aptonym
(SJD)
    An aptonym is a name that also describes what you do. In the old days, aptonyms weren’t coincidences; they were professional labels. That’s why there are still so many people named Tanner, Taylor, etc. But in our culture, they are quite rare.
    Which is why I got so excited yesterday when I spotted a fantastic aptonym. Flipping through the latest issue of Good magazine, I stopped to look at the masthead. There aretwo people listed under “Research,” which usually means fact-checking in magazine talk. One of the names is . . . Paige Worthy. That is: if a fact doesn’t get past Paige Worthy, then it’s not page-worthy, at least not for Good .
    Is this a gag name? I doubt it—all the other names on the masthead look legit—and I sincerely hope not. Can you offer a better aptonym than Paige Worthy?
    At the end of this post, we announced a contest inviting readers to submit the best aptonyms they’d ever come across. The submissions would be judged by a blue-ribbon panel of naming experts (a.k.a. Dubner and Levitt), and the winners would be sent a piece of Freakonomics swag.
Announcing the Winners of Our Aptonym Contest
(SJD)
    We recently blogged about a fact-checker named Paige Worthy and asked you to send us your own aptonyms. You responded mightily, with nearly three hundred submissions . Judging from this sample, the dentists, proctologists, and eye doctors of America seem particularly prone to aptonymous behavior. Below you will find the best submissions. But first, a little more information about the person who got this all started, Paige Worthy:
    Yes, she is real, and that is her real name. Not only is she a researcher for Good magazine, but she is also a copy editor for Ride and King magazines, both of which are geared toward a black male readership. The first is a car magazine; the second is a lad magazine, referred to in some quarters as Blaxim. “I’m a white girl, by the way,” Paige wrote in to say. She lives in New York and is originally from Kansas City—where, she says, “I worked at a little community outfit called the Sun Tribune Newspapers, where I was a copy editor and page designer, so my name was doubly apt at that point.”
    So, because she is real and because her name is the perfect aptonym, Paige Worthy definitely gets whatever