My whole life I have been plagued by the knowledge that I have a boring name. A really, really, boring name. It’s okay. I’ve come to terms with it. I am now, and forever will be, Jon Miller. I always took solace in knowing that at least I had a sort of interesting middle name: Davis. Nothing too fancy, but at least it is not quite as yawn inducing as the rest of my name.
Well, it turns out I was wrong.
You see, today I found out about this report that the NY Times (via the Census Bureau) published on their website. It ranks the top 5000 (!!!) last names in America by how common they are. I typed in “Miller” to see where it ranked. Here are the results….
I wasn’t too surprised to see that “Miller” was number 6 on the list, but the real shocker came when I looked a little closer….and saw that my middle name was number seven. So yeah. I basically have the Un-frosted Shredded Wheat of names.
But hey, I guess the glass half full way of looking at it is that at least I am the best at being boring.
Yeah! That’s right!
Suck it “Garcia” and “Rodriguez”!
Check out the list and let me know where you rank in the comments.
I have the Mexican equivalent of “John Smith” as a name: Joshua Rodriguez.
I don’t have a middle name, so that’s kind of interesting. I guess. My parents apparently just got really lazy.
i’ve always been sort of indifferent to my last name (Brownlowe) until my friend christened me as Keep It On the Brownlowe….and i am not on the 5,000 most common names!
Well, mine is pretty WASPy – Chris Cook.
I always wanted the big baad nickname but never got one.
Now, it’d seem late-in-the-game to adopt any other name,
although some folks I’ve met online know me as “Cheech”.
It was merely a quickly-thought-up username intended to
be similar enough to “Chris.” Began using it WAY before
any umm similar activities to Mr. Marin became common in
my life!
My brother said we are Scottish and Slovakian. I’m not sure
where “Cook” plays into that at all; perhaps US-immgration-
changed? I wish I had a more Scot name sometimes, ya know,
McEwan, McNab, that sorta thing.
I was right! Robare is not on the list at all.
Understand…my name is Bill Moore. Off the web though I will tell you about my sister’s name in which it was a very unique name (my parents made it up) combined with Moore (generic). Then she married and took the name of someone with a butchered (Immigration officials did not care how it was supposed to be spelled back in the day) Polish name. At least people can spell and pronouce your name.