One thing I'm missing from this article is that a name is often one of the first things people hear about you, and our primate pattern-searching brains immediat

One thing I'm missing from this article is that a name is often one of the first things people hear about you, and our primate pattern-searching brains immediately use that to lay the foundations of their first impression of you. When someone is juggling ten résumés for a job opening your name matters (even though it shouldn't) — and that's just the obvious example. A lot of name trends automatically sort you into boxes. Sometimes based on class or (parental) income, sometimes skin colour or ethnicity, sometimes religion, and of course level of education¹. Whether you want to have you child deal with those stigma or not is a personal choice, but you can't change how people perceive names overnight. Personally (and I actually get to do this in March) I would never use a name that strongly ties a child to religion or any other stigma that might hold them back. It shouldn't be, but nomen est omen holds true. 1: If someone in the Netherlands names their son 'Jayden' or 'Mason', they probably didn't go to college. Yes, that is a horrible thing to conclude based solely on a name, but that is how names tend to work. Primate pattern-searching brains, remember?