Playing the name game: more on the Mail and Mohammed

As No Sleep Til Brooklands has pointed out, if you apply the Daily Mail's "add all the names that sound a bit similar together" rule to Oliver as well as Mohammed, Oliver comes out on top by a country mile.

With nothing better to do in my lunchbreak I decided to see how the Top 10 list of names looks if you apply the same rule to all of them. It comes out like this:

1) Oliver (plus Oliwier, Oli, Oliwer, Olivers, Olliver, Ollie, Olli) = 8,148

2) Mohammed (plus Muhammad, Mohammad, Muhammed, Mohamed, Mohamad, Muhamed, Mohammod, Mahamed, Muhamad, Mahammed, Mohmmed) = 7,549

3) Jack (plus Jac, Jacques and Jacky, but not including the massed ranks of Jacobs) = 7,238

4) Charlie (plus Charley, Charlee, Charly, Charli and Charles) = 6,755

5) Thomas (plus Tommy, Tom, Thom, Tommi and Tomi) = 6,350

6) Harry (plus Harri, Hari and Harrie) = 6,332

7) Joshua (plus Josh) = 5,874

8) Alfie (plus Alfi, Alfy, Alf, Alfee, Alfey and Alffi, not including Alfred) = 5,565

9) William (plus Will, Willem, Wil and Wiliam) = 5,498

10) Daniel (plus Daniel, Danny, Daniyal, Danyal, Dan, Danyl, Danyaal, Danielius, Danial, Daniels, Daniele, Daniyaal, Dany and Daniaal) = 5,038

(Note that I've not counted compound names, where middle-class parents think they're being terribly unique by calling their child Alfie-Jack only to discover that eight other couples came up with the same idea)

Let's compare it with the Mail's top 10:

1) Mohammed (#2 in my list)

2) Oliver (#1 in my list)

3) Jack (#3 in my list)

4) Harry (#6 in my list)

5) Alfie (#8 in my list)

6) Joshua (#7 in my list)

7) Thomas (#5 in my list)

8) Charlie (#4 in my list)

9) William (#9 in my list)

10) James (not in my top 10, even with the help of 50-odd people called Jaymes)

What does this little exercise prove? We've already seen that Mohammed is clearly NOT the most popular name for boys. With the exception of James (which lost out to variations of Daniel) the names in the rest of the top 10 remain the same. However, the order in which they are ranked is completely different. Had the Mail applied the methodology it used to construct an anti-Muslim story for other, less scary names, the top 10 list they published today would have looked very different indeed.

The fact they didn't proves beyond all doubt that accuracy and "truth" are not what Jack Doyle was aiming for with this story. How can he possibly justify bunching all the Mohammeds together "because they're really the same" but not counting Daniel, Danial and Daniyall in the same way?

If you're reading, Jack (Jac? Jacques?) I'd really like to know how this doesn't breach the editors' code rules on accuracy...

Spelling mistake

Mohammed is now the most popular name for baby boys ahead of Jack and Harry

So screams the headline in today's Mail, inviting you to draw your own conclusions about how the dreaded Muslims are taking over. The comments at the foot of the article contain the usual predictable rants about immigration and "English" culture and so on.

The problem is, the Mail has had to fix the facts in order to make the story fit its readers' prejudices. As they admit halfway down the story, Mohammed is actually the 16th most popular name in Britain. But Home Affairs Correspondent Jack Doyle has taken the liberty of including various other spellings of the same name - Muhammad, Mohammad, Muhammed and so on - and added them all together in order to give the "true picture". The Office for National Statistics didn't feel the need to do this, but who are they to argue with the Mail's methodology?

Of course, Mohammed is the only name to get this treatment from the Mail. Alexs are not bundled in with Alexanders, Alixs and Alecksanders. Charlie and Charles are kept distinct. Thomas and Tom apparently have nothing in common at all.

The paper also fails to mention that naming your firstborn son after the prophet is a standard thing for Muslims, so there is always going to be a bias towards it - after all, if there was an English tradition, followed by almost everyone in the country, to call your first son "Methusula", it would comfortably top the chart year after year. Likewise, the lack of a similar tradition for female Muslim children gives parents much more flexibility on names, so there are no "Muslim" names anywhere near the top of the girls' list.

There's also a distinct lack of context - add together all of the spellings of Mohammed and you get 7,549 babies, which sounds a lot. But 362,135 male births were registered in England and Wales last year, so the massed ranks of Mohammeds make up just over two per cent of 2009's baby boys, or around one per cent of all births.

What's the story here? I think we should be far more worried that three couples chose to call their sons Zoltan.