Good morning, John.

It's me, your brother Hank, here. Trying to figure out something very simple, but yet apparently impossible to figure out: How many people could I name? I've been thinking about this for, like, two weeks straight. I'm convinced that the number is ridiculously high. Like, English has around 170,000 words. If you do not count all the conjugations. If you include technical words and old words and conjugations, you can get up to a million, but that's not what we're doing. Most people know, like, 50,000 words. And I think I might know, like, 50,000 names. I don't know I do, but I feel like I do. I just think it's a lot of names. I know the name of Percy Jackson and of LaToya Jackson; I know Isaac Mizrahi and Isaac Asimov and Oscar Isaac and Walter Isaacson. There are over a thousand just Pokemon, John, and some people know all of them. And yeah, those are not exactly names, but they're kinda names?

If there are linguists in the room, are names words? It feels like a word that is for a specific person, right? Like, what is a name except for a word for a guy. And a Pokemon name is like a word for a guy. A species of fake guy.

And then there's all the people who I know who I actually know. And I have no idea how to figure that out. There has to be a way to, like, pull all of the contacts out of Gmail. Like it's not gonna tell you the names of, like, my friends from elementary school, but it's gonna be the bulk of folks probably if you include, like, cell phone numbers too. But even leaving that aside, I think that right now at this moment in history, we, like, know a historically high number of names of people. People we don't know and people we can't know like Catherine the Great and Catherine O'Hara and Lady Katherine de Bourgh. I know a lot of names. Do all 19 Catherines from An Abundance of Katherines count? No. Miles? No, that's the other one. Colin. Colin Singleton.

Now, I have found some research on this, but it seems like they aren't really testing how many names people know. They're testing, like, name retrieval. So they have people sit and write down names for a while and then they do that over and over spaced out over time and then they do statistics to figure out what the total number is. And that comes up with a number of like 5,000, but I think that we know way more names than that. I wanna know how many names I know and I wanna count all of the fictional people and all of my friends and family and colleagues and all the historical people and all the famous people. Anybody who I have, like, a word for them and that word means something. It means, like, "That guy from that movie" or, like, oh, "He was the quarterback for the Gators in the 90s."

I think that this research is is possible and I think that it would uncover that we know, like, as many names as we know words. Maybe not. But just the fact that it's gonna be, like, a substantial percentage of the words that we know, that's really weird 'cause I do think names are words and I don't know that that's true, but I feel like they are. They're words for folk.

Now, you could imagine how to do some of this. Like, the real hard part of doing, like, the famous and fictional and historical people is, like, building a deep database of names that includes all of these people. Like, people who have some amount of notoriety and also contains data that lets you segment those people by how famous-ish they are. And then of course you need like a ton of study participants; Ideally people who are fairly trustworthy. But I have a pool of a ton of trustworthy study participants. That's you. And you know who has, like, an actual list of a ton of names of notable people and fictional characters and also page view data that is a surrogate for how likely they are to be, like, Eddie Murphy or Eddie Cochran? Wikipedia. And that data is public. Now I don't know how to get it. That's not an area of expertise that I have and I also don't have expertise in, like, how to turn this into a scientific paper that would get published. I don't even know that I have time to review proposals from other people, but I'm gonna try.

If you are a person who studies something that is approximate to what we are looking at here (I don't even know what field this would be) who has the necessary experience to extract data from Wikipedia and build like a "How many people do you know?" Tinder-style, yes-no interface that is seated with a small group of plausible sounding names of people who are fake, so that we can check how often people lie, or are just sometimes confused, and then segment the names into tiers of very famous and kind of famous and notable and barely notable, so that we can give people like 25 or 50 names from each of those categories, and then adjust for the number of people both fictional and not in each of those tiers, then you can send your grant proposal to hankandjohn@gmail.com. Or if you have better ideas.

Now this is not gonna give us a complete list of the names you know because this will just be the famous people, the fictional characters and the historical figures, but that will give us something to go on and if it goes well, maybe then, there will be another step.

John, I'll see you on Tuesday.