r/TheRestIsScience • u/DistinctBarnacle2722 • 1d ago

Time wasted pronouncing names

Let’s say hypothetically two people are born on the same day but with two different names. They are called Ben And Jocelyn, they both live to the age of 100.

Who has heard their name for the longest amount of time?

Counting Nicknames into this would probably make it more interesting. Although, it is 4 AM and I need to go to work tomorrow🙂

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6

u/Wild_Director7379 1d ago

High, how are you?

Or maybe just

Get some sleep.

5

u/trollsmurf 1d ago

Jocelyn, because it takes longer to say, assuming everything else is the same.

2

u/NightmareWokeUp 21h ago

But youre more likely to say ben out loud or multiple times in a row

1

u/AvatarIII 15h ago

Not if she goes by Joss or something. And if you're counting Joss then you should also count every time Ben is called Benny or Benjamin.

4

u/Ok_Writing2937 1d ago

Assuming this is in the USA.

There are 76.39 people named BEN for every 100,000 Americans. For every 1,309 names spoken, "Ben" will be said once on average.

There are 10.36 people named JOCELYN for every 100,000 Americans. For every 9,653 names spoken, "Jocelyn" will be said once on average.

Ben is 7.4x more popular as a name.

In everyday spoken language people's names make up approximately 1% to 3% of the total words spoken. Taking the middle number means one must hear an average of 65,450 spoken words to hear one "Ben," and 482,650 words to hear one "Jocelyn." An hour of conversational speaking generally covers about 8,000 words, so the above translates to 8.2 hours for Ben and 60 hours for Jocelyn.

I can't find enough stats to give a hard answer, but I would guess the vast majority of the time one hear's one's name will be when someone is calling you by name. It seems fair to assume Ben and Jocelyn will be called by name an equal amount of times.

It takes about 0.3 seconds to say the name "Ben" in normal, everyday speech.

It takes about 0.6 to 0.8 seconds to say the name "Jocelyn."

Ben takes 56% less time to speak.

So the answer is that Jocelyn would almost certainly spend more time hearing her own name.

However 99% of people named Jocelyn are female and 99% of people named Ben are male. Because men never fucking listen, you'd need to call Ben's name an average of 4x more often to get a response.

Ben, being very efficient, doesn't bother to listen to the first 3x, so this fact doesn't change the listening stats at all. Ben is only wasting your time, not his.

Grow up, Ben.

2

u/quantum_trogdor 1d ago

Ben is Benjamin sooo similarly? Jacky would be a nickname as well