你喜欢父母给你的名字么？

　　“Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language.” So said Dale Carnegie in his 1936 self-improvement classic, “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” That is probably true for a majority of the population — 79 percent like their names, according to a 2013 survey of 1,844 respondents.

　　“请记住，一个人的名字，无论用什么语言说出，在那人听来都是最动听、最重要的声音，”戴尔.卡耐基(Dale Carnegie)在1936年的励志经典《人性的弱点》(How to Win Friends and Influnce People)里说。大多数人可能确实如此——据2013年对1844名受访者进行的一项调查，79%的人喜欢自己的名字。

　　Unfortunately, I am in the other 21 percent. I cringe a little whenever I hear someone say my name, and have ever since I was a child. One of my earliest memories is of a lady in a department store asking me my name and bursting out laughing when I said, “Arthur.”

　　不巧，我归另外那21%。一听到有人说出我的名字，我就会有点难堪，从小就这样。我最早记得的一件事，是百货公司里一位女士问我名字，我说“亚瑟”(Arthur)，她就大笑起来。

　　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. According to the Social Security Administration, “Arthur” maxed out in popularity back in the ’90s. That is, the 1890s. It has fallen like a rock in popularity since then. I was named after my grandfather, and even he complained that his name made him sound old. Currently, “Arthur” doesn’t even crack the top 200 boys’ names. Since 2013, it has been beaten in popularity by “Maximus” (No. 200 last year) and “Maverick” (No. 85).

　　先不去评判那位女士，我们还是承认，碰见小孩起了个老年人的名字确实是很好笑的事。根据美国社会安全局(Social Security Administration)的统计，“亚瑟”的人气在90年代达到了顶峰。19世纪90年代。从那以后，它的流行度就像石头一样坠落。我的名字是随了爷爷的，连他都嫌这个名字让他显老。如今，“亚瑟”都进不了男孩常用名的前200位。从2013年至今，它的受欢迎程度还不及“马克西莫斯”(Maximus，去年是第200位)和“马弗里克”(Maverick，第85位)。

　　One thing I constantly hear from people I meet for the first time is, “I imagined you as being much older.” I don’t take this as flattery, because at 54, I’m really not that young. What they are saying is that they imagined someone about 100 years old. Why? Because people actually tend to look like their names.

　　总是听到初次见面的人对我说，“我还以为你要老得多呢。”我不觉得这是奉承话，我54了，没那么年轻。他们的意思是在他们想象里我应该是个百岁老人。为什么?因为，人如其名是确有其事的。

　　In a study last year in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers placed images of unfamiliar faces in front of participants and asked them to guess the person’s name from a list of four plausible-seeming names. The participants should have guessed correctly 25 percent of the time. Instead, they got it right 38 percent of the time. The researchers found similar results across eight studies.

　　去年《个性与社会心理学杂志》(Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)上刊载了一项研究，研究人员给受试者看一些陌生面孔的照片，让他们从都挺合理的四个选项里猜出照片上那个人的名字。受试者猜对的几率应该是25%，但事实上他们猜对了38%。研究人员在8项研究里都得到了类似的结果。