What's in a name?

This is my 1000th post on this blog. I know. I can't believe it either. Since I started writing this load of old knackers nearly two long years ago, we've seen a lot of things together. We've had some laughs, we've had some disappointments. We've had a few rows, we've made up again, we've had a lot of fun. At least, I've had a lot of fun. Anyway, the one thing that's stayed pretty much exactly the same all the way through is that newspapers write a load of old cock to fit their agendas - as Akela's guest post from earlier today shows very well.

Funnily enough this post isn't about my usual target, the Daily Mail. No, it's about a newspaper that used to be very different from the Mail - reasoned, considered, intelligent and yes, it was right-wing, but you could at least rely on the quality of the journalism and expected it didn't write a load of old bobbins to try and create some kind of knee-jerk reaction.

What a shame we have to write about the Telegraph like that in the past tense.

The story is the one you may have read elsewhere this week about baby names and the popularity of certain ones going up and other ones going down. Jack's still popular for boys - the poor things. Speaking as someone whose real name is so boringly dull that it's become a byword for banality, they're going to get quickly annoyed at school, when the teacher says "Jack!" and ten heads turn around, or when future partners say "Oh. Jack. I knew a Jack. He was an arsehole."

The Maily Telegraph, though, doesn't care about the popularity of Jack. It's trying to whip up a bit of a frenzy about the popularity of the name Mohammed, resorting to ringing up a right-wing 'think tank' which has published a series of questionable papers about Islam in order to get some outrage. It's pretty pathetic journalism, the sort of toss you'd expect the Mail to come out with in its darkest hours, but now it's standard fare for the Telegraph.

If taken together the various different spellings of Mohammed make the name the second most common name in England and Wales - and by far the most popular in both London and the West Midlands.
Jack was the most chosen name for boys for the 13th year running but is being pushed hard by Mohammed and its various alternative spellings which are expected to reach the top spot soon.

Expected - by whom? Oh, that's left hanging in the air. Perhaps no-one expects it at all, but this is classical Mail territory - implying that something unthinkably awful - a foreign name being the most popular in Britain! - is going to happen, without any evidence that it's going to happen in the slightest. Time was when you'd expect better from the Tele, but no longer, I'm afraid.

What it shows is that a lot of parents are pretty unimaginative when it comes to names, and that particularly appears to be the case with Muslim parents when they have male children - that's all. There are probably cultural factors, like Jean-Paul being a popular name for the first-born male child in France, and so on. That's all. There's no need for anyone to worry that less than one per cent of babies are called Mohammed, nor that a similar amount are called Jack. Is there? Not unless you're an idiot. Or write for the Telegraph. In which case, you may be an idiot as well.

Let's not beat around the bush. The Telegraph cares about this not because of some demand for accuracy from the Office For National Statistics but because of an agenda. I'm not just idly saying this, by the way; I can prove it.

In their quest for accuracy in the naming of children and lumping together children's names, the Telegraph has roared about Mohammed, and the variant spellings of Muhammad, Mohamed, and so on. So why doesn't it care about variant spellings of other names? The Centre for Social Cohesion foams:

Douglas Murray, Director of the Centre for Social Cohesion, said: “It’s pretty disingenuous to put out these different spellings. The names are pretty much spelled in the same way.”

It's pretty disingenuous for the Telegraph, then, not to mention that Isabella and Isabelle are 'pretty much spelled in the same way', isn't it? Because if we add them together, they make it the third most popular girls' name in Britain - maybe even more popular than the second-placed, if we include other names not listed in the top 100 because of political correctness or some such madness! For that's the claim the Telegraph makes:

Figures for five other alternative spellings - Muhammed (496), Mohamed (428), Mohamad (40), Muhamed (11) and Mohammod (10) - were later released to the Daily Telegraph.

Did you get other variant spellings of Isabelle or Isabella? No? Or how about all the different spellings of Evie, Eva, Eve and Ava, which when added together make it by far and away the most popular girls' name? Is there a shadowy conspiracy at the ONS not to put those names together, for fear of offending parents who have chosen a name with its roots *gasp* IN THE OLD TESTAMENT? No, of course there bloody well isn't, the names are separate because they're separate and it's fuck-all to do with anything but that.

Of course it doesn't. This is a story about nothing, the kind of nothing that shouldn't be made up into a story at all. It's a light frothy piece about the popularity of names, but the Telegraph has chosen to make it about the supposed rise of Mohammed, which is apparently going to be the most popular boys' name despite there not being any evidence for it, when all variant spellings are added together (and all variant spellings of Jack, Jake and even John aren't added together, of course), backed up by a quote from a notoriously flakey think-tank, to provoke the kind of knee-jerk Mailite outrage that once upon a time the Telegraph would balk at, for quality reasons alone.

Ah, how times change. Not only are there 10,000 more Mohammeds in Britain, there are also several thousand fewer Telegraph readers. Wonder how many non-Telegraph readers are called Mohammed? Now there's a thought...