Asawin Suebsaeng

Why, god, oh why did you allow my parents to name me 'Bartolina'?!?!

If your parents named you something like Hugh Gerald Wrectionz, Amanda Huggenkisse or even Jock Stirrup, there's a decent chance you grew up to be a timid, poorly educated chain smoker with a subpar sex life, according to a study just published in Social Psychological and Personality Science. The New York Daily News reports (emphasis added):

Data gathered from nearly 12,000 adult participants found that a bad first name can not only ruin your self-esteem, but it may actually make you lonelier—and dumber—research published in the [academic] journal of Social Psychological and Personality Science shows. The majority of the 12,000 people who partook in various experiments testing name desirability on the European dating website eDarling, responded that they would actually rather remain single than enter a relationship with someone with an undesirable name.

That sounds kind of brutal, right? Especially when you take into account the fact that nearly one-third of new couples are meeting online.

But wait! It gets worse:

Daters whose names matched those previously rated by teachers as belonging to "quarrelsome" students were also discriminated against, revealing a definite trend about character assumptions...[R]esearchers concluded that an "unfortunate" first name may certainly inhibit relationship formation, and may even increase one's likelihood to be smoker.

"Negative names evoke negative interpersonal reactions, which in turn influence people's life outcomes for the worse," the study said.  The trend across all sub-experiments, which drew on 11,813 adults, indicated those with "unfortunate" first names were generally more likely to smoke, be less educated and have lower self-esteem than those whose names were attractive.

For the most part, these conclusions could have easily been reached without the money and time spent on extensive scientific inquiry and large test samples: Of course an unfortunate name can help make your life a breathing train wreck. If you endured the misfortune of a goofy name, mornings in the classroom and afternoons on the playground were likely rife with incessant name-calling. Good looking girls (or boys) in high school must have had trouble saying your name right (if they could remember it at all). And even if your name is just long and not otherwise bizarre or "negative," your coworkers probably still giggle uncontrollably at your desk's name-plate, while branding you with infuriating nicknames like "T-Dawg" or "Sloppy Sec's."

If your life is in the toilet right now, this is science (yet again) telling you that it's okay to blame mom and dad. In all likelihood, you're already blaming them for your irrational fear of spiders, anyway.

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2012 Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich.

During Sunday morning's NBC News/Facebook debate in Concord, New Hampshire, former Republican front-runner Newt Gingrich picked a fight with a familiar boogeyman—the Environmental Protection Agency. The fact that the EPA is a prime target for the 2012 GOP field is no real surprise, but Gingrich has zeroed in on a particularly obscure subject: The EPA's "dust regulation."

Gingrich scored some laughs from the audience on Sunday by knocking the inanities of the EPA's effort to regulate dust. It is "an absurdity" that a government agency should be so uptight about dust in Iowa, the former House speaker said, as he explained how the regulation would hurt the families and workers of the Hawkeye State.

This issue has been in Gingrich's sights for some time. In Atlantic, Iowa before the state's caucuses last week, he slammed the EPA as a "job-killing dictatorial bureaucracy" and invoked the name of one of Iowa's top Republicans to make his case against the big-government War on Dust:

Many of you have probably followed Sen. [Chuck] Grassley's fight for the dust regulations...The EPA technically has the ability to regulate 'particulate matter,' as part of the Clean Air Bill, which I don't think any congressman thought of as 'dust.' But of course it's now interpreted to include dust. If you were to plow on a windy day, and some of the dirt was carried by the wind into your neighbor's field, you would be polluting your neighbor's field with your dirt. Now, since your neighbor's field is exactly the same geologic dirt as your field, it's implausible that you would actually be hurting it.

At least he's been consistent on this. Too bad what was wrong then is still wrong now. The heart of the EPA-is-out-to-micromanage-America's-dust hysteria is based almost entirely on a poor interpretation of language and law. The Des Moines Register did their share of debunking on the matter, and my colleague Tim Murphy did the same:

[T]he EPA does not regulate dust as we might think of it, at least not the kind of dust you'd laugh at if a candidate brought it up in a speech. Instead, they go after "particulate matter," which, although it just sounds like a euphemism for dust, is actually a euphemism for "things that will produce uneconomic health and environmental effects if you breathe too much of them." Soot would be the best example (and incidentally, something the EPA has been pretty lax about), or coal dust. Contra Gingrich's assertion that the agency had taken the initiative to looking into regulating dirt, the EPA was required by law to review its standards on particulate matter to make sure that it was keeping up with the science. That was interpreted by the agriculture industry as a sign that new regulations were imminent, but EPA chief Lisa Jackson told Congress she had "no plans" to regulate dust, and, sure enough, no new regulations were issued.

For Gingrich, denouncing the EPA's alleged jihad on dust and dirt might be an easy applause line, like, say, threatening to purge federal courts. But that's really all it is.

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