Michael Stevens, whose videos I generally enjoy, posits an interesting question:
In typical Vsauce fashion, he delves into other issues, but the video prompted me to ponder the uniqueness of my name, Brian Arner.
For years I assumed that I was the world’s only Brian Arner. Outside of my immediate family, I was only aware of a small clan of Arners, living near Chattanooga, and none of them were named Brian.
Then, when I was in my 20s, I heard from a former teacher that he had helped move a relative onto campus–named Brian Arner! This was disconcerting. An email had stripped me of my singularity. I shared the world with a namesake. The once orderly cosmos now churned with confusion What was he like? Was he stealing my identity? Would I soon be saddled with someone else’s debt?
That was not the end of it. Later, when I put a website up, I was surprised–and amused–to have a few emailers contact me, asking if they could purchase my music. Turns out there’s yet another Brian Arner, a distantly-related Christian vocal artist. He’s older than me. So I was not the first, or last, Brian Arner.
In the early 2000s, when I became interested in genealogy, I discovered the Arner family is much larger than I imagined, especially in Pennsylvania, where the family first settled. According to this site, there were 1,293 Arners counted in the 2000 U.S. Census, making it the 19,376th most common surname.
Based on a statistical calculation of name frequency, the website HowManyOfMe.com estimates there may be six Brian Arners in America.
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So while unique names still exist, mine is not one of them. But I’ve learned that’s OK. I’ve had a few minor identity hiccups online, but no harm no foul. People don’t treat me as a cheap clone. The debt collectors haven’t beaten down my door looking for someone else. The sun still rises and sets every day.
Because ultimately I am not Brian Arner, the two words people use to describe me. As Shakespeare famously mused:
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet
We get our uniqueness, our real identity, from who we are as people, not from our names.