When My Own Name Became a Small Research Project

On 5 January 2009, I apparently decided that my own name required investigation.

Sercan.

A perfectly ordinary problem to have with a perfectly ordinary name.

Except I had noticed something that bothered me.

People did not always seem convinced that it was an unmistakably male name.

I was.

Completely.

Apparently the rest of the country had not received the memo.

So I did what people increasingly did in 2009 when reality failed to agree with them:

I searched the internet.

More specifically, I searched Facebook.

At that moment, according to the entry I wrote, I found 291 men named Sercan.

I even added the obvious qualification:

that number did not include people who had hidden themselves from search.

This was not a scientific study.

It was a man trying to prove a point about his own first name using Facebook.

Which may be one of the most 2009 forms of research imaginable.

The entry continued with more numbers.

I wrote that Sercan was overwhelmingly used as a male name.

I recorded a percentage precise enough to suggest that I had either found a source somewhere or done a calculation with unnecessary enthusiasm.

I also wrote that it was supposedly the 495th most commonly used name in Turkey.

Again, those are numbers I recorded in 2009.

I am not presenting them now as current statistics.

The interesting part is not whether the ranking was perfect.

The interesting part is that I cared enough to collect evidence.

Why would anyone need to prove the gender of his own name?

Because names do something strange.

They belong to us more intimately than almost any other word, yet their meaning is controlled mostly by other people.

You do not choose the name first.

Someone gives it to you.

Then everyone else decides what it sounds like.

Old-fashioned.

Modern.

Religious.

Urban.

Rural.

Male.

Female.

Rich.

Poor.

Serious.

Funny.

Trustworthy.

Strange.

Before you say a sentence, your name has already introduced you.

And sometimes it introduces you incorrectly.

That was the irritation behind the old entry.

To me, Sercan sounded unmistakably male.

Not vaguely male.

Not statistically male.

Male.

The younger version of me used much more emphatic language.

The question was not open for discussion.

And yet apparently enough people had treated the name as ambiguous that I felt the need to build a case.

So I compared it with neighboring names.

Serdar.

Serkan.

Sertan.

Ercan.

Even Esercan.

Why, I asked, did those names create the expected impression while Sercan somehow failed to do so for some people?

This is not linguistics.

It is personal annoyance disguised as linguistics.

But the question is genuinely interesting.

Names do not behave logically.

Two names can differ by one sound and carry completely different social impressions.

Serkan sounds one way.

Sercan another.

Selcan another.

The letters are close.

The cultural associations are not.

This is how language works outside dictionaries.

People do not hear phonemes alone.

They hear every person they have previously met with the name.

Every television character.

Every footballer.

Every classmate.

Every relative.

Every headline.

Every joke.

A name accumulates people.

Then a new person arrives carrying all that baggage without knowing it.

Perhaps that is why one person hears Sercan and thinks “obviously male,” while another hesitates.

They are not hearing the same word.

They are hearing different histories of the word.

The old entry also rejected a claim I had apparently encountered about the name being associated with a particular social or cultural group.

I wrote that the generalization was completely wrong.

What matters now is not the specific generalization itself.

It is the larger habit.

Humans love explaining names through categories.

This is a name from that region.

Those families use it.

That generation prefers names like this.

People with that background choose names like these.

Sometimes there is statistical truth underneath such observations.

Sometimes there is pure folklore.

Often we do not know which.

But once a stereotype attaches itself to a name, the person carrying the name may spend years meeting the stereotype before anyone meets the person.

That can be amusing when harmless.

It can also be exhausting.

Names are small objects with surprising social weight.

They influence first impressions before the owner has done anything.

This is especially obvious when communication becomes text-based.

A phone call gives you a voice.

Meeting in person gives you a face.

An email, forum post, or social-network profile may give you only a name.

The reader begins constructing the person immediately.

Male or female?

Young or old?

Local or foreign?

Formal or informal?

The name becomes a low-resolution photograph.

Sometimes the resolution is too low.

The early social web made these little identity puzzles much more visible.

Facebook was still strongly built around real names.

Forums and Ekşi Sözlük had nicknames.

Messenger had display names that people changed according to mood, relationship status, song lyrics, or whatever crisis was taking place that evening.

Across all of them, names mattered differently.

A nickname could be invented.

A real name arrived with family history.

That made searching your own name strangely compelling.

How many others are there?

Who are they?

Do they look like me?

Are they older?

Younger?

What cities are they in?

Does my name belong to a generation?

Am I one example of a pattern I never noticed?

The moment social networks became searchable databases of people, ordinary users discovered amateur demography.

Type your surname.

Type your first name.

Search your school.

Search your hometown.

Suddenly personal curiosity looked almost quantitative.

291 men named Sercan.

There.

Evidence.

Before social networks, you could know that other people shared your name.

Of course.

But you rarely saw hundreds of them assembled by a search box.

The database changed the psychological scale.

A name that felt personal suddenly became a category.

You were not Sercan.

You were one Sercan among many Sercans.

This can be oddly destabilizing.

Our names feel unique because people around us usually use them to summon one person.

You.

Then a search engine shows you a page full of the same label attached to strangers.

The uniqueness was contextual.

Not lexical.

That is a useful reminder.

Identity is never contained in the name.

The name is an index.

It points.

The person is everything behind the pointer.

Two people can share the exact same name and have nothing else in common.

Yet databases will place them side by side.

The old entry tried to defend the name by statistics.

Looking at it now, I am more interested in the need for defense.

Why did it matter whether strangers thought Sercan sounded fully masculine?

At twenty-something, these classifications can feel important.

You want the outside world to read you correctly.

Not approximately.

Correctly.

There is confidence in saying:

This is what my name is.

This is what it means socially.

Stop misreading it.

Getting older tends to weaken the urgency.

Not because identity stops mattering.

Because you learn how badly people classify almost everything.

Names.

Jobs.

Cities.

Universities.

Clothes.

Cars.

Accents.

Relationships.

A person hears one detail and constructs the rest.

Usually too quickly.

You can spend your life correcting those constructions.

Or you can let some of them collapse under their own weight.

The name survives either way.

Sercan does not become more or less my name depending on whether someone hesitates for two seconds.

That seems obvious now.

It probably did not feel quite as obvious in 2009.

There is also humor in the precision of the old entry.

291.

A percentage with far too many decimal places.

495th.

This is what happens when a personal irritation meets an engineering temperament.

Emotion says:

People keep getting this wrong.

The response is:

Fine. I will bring data.

There is something touching about believing numbers can settle a social impression.

They cannot always.

You can prove that a name is used by men 99 percent of the time and someone can still say:

It sounds feminine to me.

What do you do with that?

Nothing.

Taste is not defeated by spreadsheets.

Perception does not obey majority vote.

This is one of adulthood’s recurring disappointments.

Facts can settle factual questions.

They do not always settle impressions.

If someone says the sun is 150 million kilometers away, measurement matters.

If someone says a name sounds soft, strong, masculine, feminine, modern, old-fashioned, elegant, provincial, or strange, data can describe usage but cannot completely erase association.

Culture is messy.

It refuses to become a clean table.

The old entry also suggested Selcan as the female counterpart to Sercan.

Again, this is the mind looking for symmetry.

If Sercan is male, Selcan is female.

Problem solved.

Language laughs.

Names are not algebra.

Still, humans like patterns.

They help us organize the social world.

The problem begins when we confuse the pattern with the person.

A name may suggest.

It should not decide.

I think this is why I now find naming so interesting.

Parents choose one word before they know most of the person who will carry it.

The child then spends decades filling that word with meaning.

At birth, Sercan was simply a choice someone made.

Later it became school attendance.

Documents.

Friends calling across a room.

Teachers mispronouncing or not mispronouncing it.

Email addresses.

User accounts.

Work.

Family.

A name starts empty and becomes autobiographical.

Eventually hearing it in another context can feel strange because you have occupied it for so long.

Someone calls “Sercan” in a crowded place and several heads may turn.

For half a second, each person feels summoned.

The word belongs to all of them.

And to each one privately.

That is an elegant contradiction.

Names are shared private property.

The 2009 Facebook search made that contradiction visible.

291 men.

All carrying the same first label.

None of them me.

The old entry also belongs to a period when Facebook search results themselves felt interesting.

Finding hundreds of people with the same name was worth mentioning.

Today searchable identity feels ordinary.

Databases are everywhere.

Profiles everywhere.

The novelty has faded.

But the underlying curiosity has not.

People still search themselves.

Search old classmates.

Search names.

Search images.

Search professional profiles.

We want to see how the world represents us when we are not the one doing the representing.

That is partly vanity.

Partly security.

Partly curiosity.

Partly the unsettling awareness that there is now a public shadow attached to every name.

Your name is not only what people call you.

It is also a query.

Type it and see what returns.

That transformation may be one of the quietest cultural changes of the internet age.

Before search engines, a name primarily pointed from people toward you.

After search engines, it also points from databases toward information about you.

A name became an interface.

In 2009, I used that interface to answer a much simpler question:

Come on. This is a man’s name, right?

Apparently I was not satisfied with intuition.

I wanted witnesses.

Facebook supplied 291 of them.

There is one more reason this entry deserves to survive.

It preserves how seriously we can care about tiny things that no longer seem urgent.

That is not embarrassing.

It is valuable.

A personal archive should not contain only major convictions.

It should preserve minor obsessions too.

The exact thing that irritated you.

The argument you were prepared to have.

The statistic you collected for no reason anyone else would understand.

These details recover personality better than a list of accomplishments.

A formal biography might say:

Sercan Külcü, computer engineer, academic, teacher.

Fine.

But it would never say:

In January 2009, he searched Facebook for other men named Sercan because he was annoyed that people did not treat the name as unambiguously male.

That is much more human.

The unnecessary research is the memory.

And perhaps that is what names finally become.

Not definitions.

Containers.

They collect every ridiculous argument, every introduction, every signature, every person who calls us from another room.

Over time the social meaning matters less than the accumulated personal meaning.

Maybe some people still hear Sercan and hesitate.

Maybe not.

The question no longer needs a percentage.

After enough years, a name stops needing to prove what kind of name it is.

It simply becomes the sound people use when they mean you.