291 Names

One evening, a small argument about my first name sent me to Facebook. I had always heard the name as unmistakably male, but apparently not everyone did. The disagreement was too minor to matter and just irritating enough to investigate.

I typed the name into the search box and started counting. The result I wrote down was 291 men with the same first name. I remember the satisfaction of that number more clearly than I remember the argument itself. Two hundred and ninety-one felt like evidence.

Once I had a number, I kept going. I looked at percentages, rankings, and nearby names, turning a small annoyance into a private research project. The screen filled with people who shared the same label but nothing else I could see. For a while, statistics seemed capable of settling something that had started as a question of how a word sounded.

They did not.

The search results made the problem stranger instead. A first name feels personal because people use it to call one person across a room, yet the same word can belong to hundreds or thousands of strangers. On the screen, 291 people stood behind the same name.

I had gone online to prove what kind of name I had.

The search gave me a number instead.

Two hundred and ninety-one people shared the word. None of them made it any more or less mine.