Tuesday, April 04, 2006

How popular is your name?

I get forwarded all kinds of emails from friends asking me to take this survey or fill out this questionaire or go to this website to fill in my information - some of it is tedious, but some can be suprisingly fun.

I stumbled across this link when I was filling in my birthday info for a friend -

Find out how popular your first name has been over the past 100 years, just Click Here and enter your first name.

So I clicked and here is what I found out about the fantastic first name JASON...

It means healer - i think from the ancient Greek. Maybe my parents wanted a doctor in the family... Sorry Mom & Dad - didn't happen. :)

Jason was the 3rd most popular name for boys in the 1970s and the 8th most popular in the 1980s. No real suprise here - i knew many Jasons growing up. I was born in 1969, so I guess my parents got in early. I used to be the only Jason in all of Shimane, but this year two new ALTs named Jason came, so now it's just like being back in high school - Jason who? which one? haha

So i typed in my old girlfriend's name - Heather - because she used to always joke that Jason & Heather was the name of the uber-white Californian couple and she is probably right - Heather was the 8th most popular girl's name in the 1970s and the 10th most popular in the 1980s. Curious about Heather - doesn't even rank on the list pre-1940s - like it's a modern name.

I seemed to know more Jennifers and Micheles growing up - and they both rank a bit higher - altho you get diff results if you type Michele and if you type Michelle.

Anyway - how does your name rank? I assume this is mostly an American-generated list, so my apologies if your name is not widely known in America.

-Jason
The Healer

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Jason, almighty healer...

I somehow found your website while browsing, and entered my name, which is Taisha.

no real surprise, nothing came up at all.lol

I know it means number nine in Hebrew, yes i have hippy jewish father...lol

I would be very curious to know what it means there, in Taisha.

because of namke alone, it has become one of my destination dreams, up there with Amsterdam!

peace~ Taisha Levy

Emily K said...

The first Gemma I met was in Japan (Shimane Gemma), but I hear it's a very popular name in the UK.

Jason H. said...

Ms. Levy -

Glad you stumbled across my site - if you click and go to my online Flickr photo album you can see pics of the IzumoTaisha shrine - it's a truly magnificent place.

Taisha is a great name, BTW. I have a friend here who decided that she would name her daughter "Taisha" if she had one - I'll have to tell her she won't be the first one. :)

In Japanese, "taisha" usually means "Grand Shrine." But it can also mean regeneration, renewal and amnesty. "jinja" also means "shrine" in Japanese, so when we say IzumoTaisha jinja - what we are basically saying is "The Great Shrine at Izumo shrine" - a bit redundant, but there you go.

And yeah - Amsterdam is way cool - go there for sure!

-Jason