Parents are fleeing from a name that can be, at best, a nuisance and, at worst, associated with subservience.
By Joe Pinsker


家长们正避免使用一个名字。这个名字，最好的情况，可能是一个讨厌的人，最坏的情况，可能与顺从有关。
作者: 乔. 平斯克





（图片来源 ：Getty; Paul Spella / 《大西洋月刊》)


Alexa used to be a name primarily given to human babies. Now it’s mainly for robots.


Alexa这个名字过去主要是用在人类宝宝身上, 可现在它主要给机器人用了。


Seven years ago, Amazon released Alexa, its voice assistant, and as the number of devices answering to that name has skyrocketed, its popularity with American parents has plummeted. In fact, it has suffered one of the sharpest declines of any popular name in recent years. “Alexa stands alone as a name that was steadily popular—not a one-year celebrity wonder, not a fading past favorite—that was pushed off the popularity cliff,” Laura Wattenberg, the founder of the naming-trends website Namerology, told me.


七年前，亚马逊发布了其语音助手Alexa。但随着用这个名字的设备数量激增，它在美国父母中的受欢迎程度却直线下降。实际上，它是近年来所有受欢迎的名字中跌幅最大的一个。"命名趋势网站Namerology的创始人劳拉·沃特伯格告诉我："Alexa这个名字的受欢迎程度持续稳定--它不是在一年内声名鹊起的奇迹，也不是一个被推下流行的悬崖，逐渐沉寂的过气的名字。


At first, the number of baby Alexas spiked following the voice assistant’s rollout in late 2014—perhaps parents heard the name in the news and liked it—but it has since crashed. Likely, parents began to realize that having the name could be a nuisance, or worse, could become associated with subservience, because people are always giving orders to their virtual Alexas.


起初，在2014年底语音助手推出后，名为Alexa的婴儿的数量激增--也许是父母们在新闻中听到了这个名字并喜欢上了它--但此后却出现了暴跌。很可能是父母们开始意识到，拥有这个名字可能是一种困扰，或者更糟糕的是，可能与顺从联系在一起，因为人们总是对他们的虚拟Alexa们下命令。




This up-and-down pattern reminded Wattenberg of what happens with babies named after hurricanes, when “the news coverage and attention causes the name to briefly shoot up, and then the aftermath, when the name is constantly referred to as a disaster, kind of kills it off.” Basically, Amazon’s impact on the name Alexa resembles that of a natural disaster. (When I reached out to the company, it didn’t comment on whether it had played a role in Alexa’s decline.)
(The Atlantic | Data: Laura Wattenberg; Social Security Administration)


这个起伏变化让沃滕伯格想起了用飓风命名的婴儿的情况，"新闻报道和关注使这个名字的采用短暂飙升，然后，当这个名字不断地被称为灾难时，它就会被毁掉。" 基本上，亚马逊对Alexa这个名字的影响类似于一场自然灾害。(当我联系亚马逊时，对方没有就其是否在Alexa的衰落中扮演角色做出评论。）





《大西洋月刊 》| 数据: 劳拉·沃特伯格; 社会保障局
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处



Alexa joins a handful of other names that were toppled by a shift in association. Perhaps the most famous is Hillary, which was in fashion in the late 1980s but fell out of style after Hillary Clinton became first lady. (Wattenberg said parents tend not to choose politicians’ names, regardless of party.) Dick lost its appeal when it was no longer primarily used as a nickname for Richard, and more recently, parents ran from the name Isis when it became connected to terrorism.


Alexa加入了其他一些因联想意义改变而跌出受欢迎的名字的行列。也许最有名的是希拉里，这个名字在20世纪80年代末很流行，但在希拉里.克林顿成为第一夫人后就不再流行了(沃滕伯格说，父母往往不会选择政治家的名字，无论他(她)属于哪个党派) 。当迪克不再主要作为理查德的昵称时，它就失去了吸引力，而最近，当伊希斯这个名字与恐怖主义联系在一起时，家长们就放弃了它。


The data on baby names released by the Social Security Administration don’t indicate why parents pick or avoid particular names, but Alexa’s trajectory mirrors the adoption of smart speakers in the U.S. Bret Kinsella, the founder of Voicebot.ai, a site that covers and analyzes data on the voice-assistant industry, told me that consumer uptake surged three years after Alexa’s release, in 2017. And the number of baby Alexas plunged below its pre-Amazon baseline in 2018—that may be when many parents started to understand the ubiquity of the name. (Now more than 90 million American adults are estimated to have a smart speaker in their household.)


社会保障局发布的婴儿名字数据并没有说明父母为什么选择或避免使用特定的名字，但Alexa的发展轨迹反映了美国智能音箱的采用情况。Voicebot.ai网站的创始人布雷特.金塞拉告诉我，在Alexa发布三年后，也就是2017年，消费者对它的接受程度激增。而在2018年，名为Alexa的婴儿的数量骤降至亚马逊之前的基线以下水平--可能也正是这个时候，许多父母开始理解这个名字无处不在。(据估计，现在有超过9000万的成年美国人家中拥有一个智能扬声器。)


Trend lines in other countries provide further evidence that Amazon was what punctured the name Alexa’s popularity. The voice assistant’s debut in the United Kingdom (in 2016) and in Canada (in 2017) were also followed by drop-offs in baby Alexas. (Owners can sext a different “wake word” for their device so that they don’t have to say “Alexa” to get its attention, but that doesn’t much alter the name’s associations.)


其他国家的趋势线提供的证据进一步表明亚马逊削弱了Alexa这个名字的流行度。语音助手在英国（2016年）和加拿大（2017年）的首次亮相也伴随着婴儿名为Alexa的数量的下降。(用户可以为他们的设备选择一个不同的 "唤醒词"，这样他们就不必说 "Alexa "来引起它的注意，但这并没有改变多少这个名字的联想效果。)


It is not inherently a problem for a person and a product to share a name, Wattenberg noted—for instance, Dakota and Sierra have led happy double lives as names for both humans and pickup trucks.


沃滕伯格指出，一个人和一个产品共用一个名字本身并不是问题，例如，达科他和塞拉作为人和皮卡的名字，过着幸福的双重生活。


What’s different about Alexa is that Amazon turned it into a name for a female voice that does your bidding. Other tech companies with voice assistants, though, have avoided annexing a popular name. Google’s voice assistant just goes by Google, and Microsoft’s is Cortana, which is in fact a name, but a very rare one.


Alexa的不同之处在于，亚马逊把它变成了一个服从你的指令的女声助手的名字。不过，其他拥有语音助手的科技公司都避免纳用一个流行的名字。谷歌的语音助手只叫谷歌，而微软的语音助手是科塔娜，这实际上是一个名字，但非常罕见。


Meanwhile, Apple has produced a much milder version of an Alexa effect. Siri wasn’t a particularly popular name to begin with before Apple released its voice assistant, Siri, 10 years ago, but it’s become even less popular since. The number of baby Siris each year fell from 111 in 2010 to 10 in 2020. There’s also been a drop-off in some Nordic countries, where the name is more common; last year, Denmark produced just one lone baby Siri. (Apple also did not comment on its role in the name Siri’s decline.)


与此同时，苹果公司产生了一个温和版的Alexa效果。10年前苹果发布其语音助手Siri之前，Siri并不是一个特别受欢迎的名字，但此后它变得更加不受欢迎。每年Siri宝宝的数量从2010年的111个下降到2020年的10个。在这个名字更常见的一些北欧国家，使用数量也有所下降；去年，丹麦只出生了一个Siri婴儿(苹果公司也没有对其在Siri这个名字的下降中的作用发表评论)。


“We don’t usually think about the individuals who are already born when this happens, but the impact on their lives is real as well,” Philip Cohen, a sociologist at the University of Maryland at College Park, told me. Sharing a name with a robot can be tiresome. “‘OMG, Siri like the iPhone,’ should be engraved on my tombstone,” complained Siri Bulusu, a journalist, in a 2016 piece about her name. And name overlaps have led to sitcom-style misunderstandings, like when, as The Wall Street Journal reported, one dad asked his daughter Alexa for some water, and their robot Alexa responded by offering to order a case of Fiji water for $27.


马里兰大学学院公园分校的社会学家菲利普-科恩告诉我说，"当这种情况发生时，我们通常不会想到已经出生的个体，但对他们的生活的影响也是真实的”。 "与机器人共用一个名字可能会让人厌烦。" 记者Siri Bulusu在2016年一篇关于她的名字的文章中抱怨道，“我的天啦，Siri像iPhone应该刻在我的墓碑上"。名字的重叠导致了情景喜剧式的误解，就像《华尔街日报》 报道的那样，一位父亲向他的女儿Alexa要水喝，而他们的机器人Alexa回应说要花27美元订购一箱斐济水。


But Amazon’s choice of name has had much darker effects on the lives of some Alexas, particularly the younger ones who get teased at school with an onslaught of commands. Wattenberg observed that the only Alexa that many of today's children know is the virtual one that their family bosses around, so it’s not surprising that some of them go on to belittle classmates with the same name. “Many parents [of Alexas] are changing their kids’ names or using their middle names because it leads to just horrendous bullying,” she told me.


但是，亚马逊对这个名字的选择对一些Alexa的生活产生了更大的影响，特别是那些在学校里被一堆命令取笑的小孩子们。瓦滕伯格观察到，今天的许多孩子唯一知道的Alexa是他们的家人支配的虚拟Alexa，所以他们中的一些人去轻视同名的同学也就不足为奇。她告诉我："许多Alexa的父母正在给孩子改名或把Alexa作为孩子的中间名, 因为这导致了可怕的霸凌行为。”


When I asked Amazon if it has considered relinquishing the name Alexa, a company spokesperson did not answer that question but said, “Bullying of any kind is unacceptable, and we condemn it in the strongest possible terms.”


当我问亚马逊是否考虑放弃Alexa这个名字时，公司发言人没有回答这个问题，而是说："任何形式的霸凌行为都是不可接受的，我们以最强烈的方式谴责它。"


Amazon did not exactly ruin the life of every Alexa, but the consequences of its decision seven years ago are far-reaching—roughly 127,000 American baby girls were named Alexa in the past 50 years, and more than 75,000 of them are younger than 18. Amazon didn’t take their perfectly good name out of malice, but regardless, it’s not giving it back.


亚马逊并没有完全毁掉每一个Alexa的生活，但其七年前的决定的后果是深远的--在过去50年中，大约有12.7万名美国女婴被命名为Alexa，其中超过7.5万名女婴的年龄小于18岁。亚马逊并不是出于恶意夺走了他们完美的名字，但无论如何，它都不会把它还给你。
原创翻译：龙腾网 http://www.ltaaa.cn 转载请注明出处