If my name was Dave I'd probably be long over this, but there just aren't very many Leonards. According to government statistics, 7 in 1000 Americans in my age cohort are named Leonard. That sounds okay but it's only 1250 people. But on the other hand, I'd only need to meet 98 people before I had a better-than-even chance of meeting another Leonard.
I'm mainly reproducing this graph because I like the way the x-axis is labelled. "Leonard" is right near the tick to the right of "Roy". Incidentally, "Leonard" is even less popular now then when I was born, having switched popularities with "Leonardo". Pre-Web I sometimes found it a burden to have an unpopular name, but now on balance it's great. I guess what I'm saying is, name your kid Leonard.
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(6) Tue Apr 08 2008 19:11 Namespace Collision:
Today Leonard Lin linked to Beautiful Soup. I've never met Leonard but we know many of the same people, and so I keep running into traces of him and getting confused. Danny O'Brien once cced me on a mail that made no sense because I wasn't the Leonard he'd had a particular brainstorm with. Then there was the time I was on a consulting job and started encountering comments like "Leonard suggests X" in code I'd never seen before. Yup, guess who.
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