Those ugly vowels  

I guess I'm dealing with a lot of name related issues this week. The latest research (actually the only research) on the sexiness of various names is out, and the news is not good. It turns out that, for males, names with back vowels were considered less sexy (by those who know, that is, folks on the internet at the website hotornot.com) than names with front vowels. The specific example they gave of an unsexy name was Paul (of particular interest to me, for some reason). The reverse was true for female names: long-vowelled names were considered sexier than short-vowelled names. So, I guess my options are to change my name or change my gender?

Maybe I'm motivated by my own newfound name insecurity, but I have a couple gripes about the paper's conclusions/methodology. From the introduction:

The Saussurean assumption that there is nothing inherent in the relation between a sound pattern and a concept is taken for granted in most of cognitive science. Though the notion that sound-meaning pairings are arbitrary is rarely challenged, there is some evidence indicating that this conjecture may not be wholly true.

And from the conclusion:

This research argues against the Saussurean notion that word-referent associations are completely arbitrary pairings. It suggests that at least under some circumstances, there is a systematic and significant link between some sounds in a language and the semantic associations belonging to words with those sounds.

But the research doesn't show that at all! Saussure's point wasn't that word-referent pairings are completely arbitrary within a linguistic context. He was saying that the sounds we use to create meaning are arbitrary across languages. So, while the name Paul might be unsexy in English or in America, there might be other cultures or liguistic contexts where that same sequence of sounds has an entirely different meaning and effect (and that's where, apparently, I should move). For Saussure, the linguistic context is what creates meaning, rather than anything intrinsic about the sound itself.

If this research had looked at the sexiness of names with long and short vowels across all world languages, or at least a random sample, then one could begin to draw the conclusion that Ms. Perfors has drawn. But I'll lay any odds that the result wouldn't hold up in such a test.

MORE: Mark Liberman has a further discussion here.