= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Alicorn comments on What's In A Name? - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (132)
This makes little sense to me. It would explain it if people only had a tendency to like people/places/things with the same (or almost the same) name as them (e.g. you might see a lot of people named Alex marrying each other and a lot of Britneys with best friends named Brittany - and in fact, my best friend in middle school shared my first name). But my first initial doesn't strike me as being more a part of my identity than, say, the number of letters long my name is - is there some correlation there too? Do people named John like to live in Ohio because it has four letters? And if you start looking that hard, doesn't this turn into Bible-code-esque seek-hard-enough-and-ye-shall-find stuff? I mean, I'm sure there are a hundred things significant to my life that have some trivial connection to my name or the name of my hometown or the name of my first guppy.
I agree that my theory doesn't explain the first initial bias, but maybe that phenomenon has a completely different cause.
I think the first initial bias has more to do with the fact that we get an orienting response from hearing or reading our name, which causes us to pay extra attention to the message source (our liking of the source would result from our paying more attention to it). I hypothesize that we also get an orienting response from hearing or reading messages that are similar to our names.
Reading the word "Alicorn" might unconsciously grab your attention more than "Olicorn" even though they would sound the same (I think). Generalizing from this example, maybe reading words that simply start with a capital "A" grab your attention more than words starting with other capital letters. Hence, you pay more attention (and therefore like) people/places/things that start with a capital A.
I can't think of a way to pronounce "Olicorn" the way "Alicorn" is pronounced (the first syllable rhymes with "pal" and "shall", not "doll" or "call").
For reference, I had to read that sentence a lot of times to make sense of it, as I pronounce "doll" with the same vowel as "pal" and "shall", and I can't currently imagine a way that I would pronounce "doll" the same as "call". Also, I read "Olicorn" as being likely pronounced the same as "Alicorn" (the O as in Oliver, the A as in Alexander).
May I ask where you are from? I've never heard anyone pronounce "doll" the same as "pal", and if there's one thing I'm fascinated by, it's accents (speaking as someone who has been confounded by his own Canadian raising. About. Not aboot.).
Shelton, CT, USA. I believe my accent is typical of that region of the Naugatuck River Valley, usually referred to as the 'valley drawl'.
I guess you and I have different accents. The A in "Alicorn" (and in "Alexander", too, both instances) is the same one I use in "pal", "shall", "cat", "fan", "rabbi", "lad", "granny", etc. The O in "Oliver" is the same vowel for me as "doll" and "call", which most of the time rhyme (although when I'm trying very carefully to speak distinctly, they start to sound a little different).
This conversation probably shouldn't continue without the use of audio and/or a standard phonetic representation. Suffice it to say that one or both of us talks (and hears) funny.
Ah, thought it would be like "Ali" in "Muhammad Ali".
Nope, it's a short I. Like "unicorn", with the "al" in front instead of the "u".