The 21 percent of people who don’t like their first names
Arthur Brooks, until recently the head of the American Enterprise Institute, a leading Washington, D.C., conservative think tank, is a very interesting fellow. He spent a decade playing the French horn with a symphony orchestra, but is far better known as a social scientist and a writer on themes like happiness and giving.
He’s also, by his own admission, among the 21 percent of people who don’t like their first names. He writes that ever since he was a child, he has cringed a bit whenever he hears someone say his name. “One of my earliest memories,” he wrote two years ago, “is of a lady in a department store asking me my name and bursting out laughing when I said, ‘Arthur.’ Before you judge that lady, let’s acknowledge that it is actually pretty amusing to meet a little kid with an old man’s name…. One thing I constantly hear from people I meet for the first time is, ‘I imagined you as being mu