A lot of cool things in our world are actually done just for fun. Take the platypus, for example – it’s a clear example of the unbridled and frivolous atmosphere on Noah’s Ark! But seriously, very often, something done just for fun later has a serious impact on real life.
Want more proof of this? Then voila – here’s this story from the user u/Elfwing. A story about how a simple online prank by two schoolers found a really unexpected continuation years later on a completely different continent. But let’s take things in order!
More info: Reddit
Sometimes, many cool things are actually done just for fun, and here’s another example for you
Image credits: freepik / Freepik (not the actual photo)
The author of the post wasn’t a very popular student at high school a decade ago, so they used to hide from bullies in the school library
Image credits: Elfwing
Image credits: freepik / Freepik (not the actual photo)
One day, the author and their best friend found a Swedish website with the detailed statistics of all given names
Image credits: Elfwing
Image credits: freepik / Freepik (not the actual photo)
The schoolers found the “ugliest” name and started spamming it in the search in order to put it to the top
Image credits: Elfwing
A decade later, the author decided to check it and found out that 5 more people now had this name – maybe due to this silly prank
So, this all happened about ten years ago, when the Original Poster (OP) was in high school, and, let’s be honest, they weren’t exactly the most popular student. Something like Peter Parker before he got bitten by that spider. Unlike Peter, however, no one bit the author, and they and their best friend didn’t develop any superpowers (except for the ability to watch anime for hours).
So they had to hide from the school bullies in the library. While there, the friends were surfing the internet on the local computer and one day found a Swedish online resource for choosing baby names. It had statistics on all the names used in the country, counting the number of people with each name.
The friends thought this was the basis for a good prank. They chose the ugliest name (in their opinion), one shared by only two people in all of Sweden, and started spamming the site with search queries. This was to create the impression that the name was really popular. Within a couple of months, they had it at the top of the search results on the site, but then the joke got boring and they abandoned it.
Imagine the original poster’s surprise when, ten years later, they remembered this old joke, went to that very website, found the name… and it turned out that seven Swedes now had it! “So yeah, if you’re Swedish, born around 2015, and your name is ugly… I’m sorry,” the author summarizes.
Image credits: New Africa / Freepik (not the actual photo)
Well, we did a detailed search, and here’s what we found. First, starting in 2024, Swedish statistical organizations stopped publishing detailed data on every name in the country. So, you can enter a name and get data on the number of people bearing it, but usually it’s limited to a table of the 1,000 most popular names (and the name ranked last in that table is found for a few thousand Swedes. So, that’s not an option).
But we have the AI, as well as the original poster’s text, claiming the name sounds like Gorp or Poopi (yes, 15-year-olds found that very funny). The AI returned a list of the least commonly used names in Sweden, including, for example, the male name Gylfi (which also begins with a G and ends with an I, and is most similar to the names mentioned by the author).
Overall, Gylfi is a beautiful name, borne by one of the legendary kings from the Viking sagas. Incidentally, the name is quite common today, for example, in Iceland (it’s borne, among others, by the famous soccer player Gylfi Sigurðsson), but in Sweden today, there are only 11 people with it. Well, it looks like we’ve found the truth…
Perhaps, if it really is Gylfi, the 15-year-olds might’ve found the similarity of a male name to the word “girl” quite ridiculous. But, in any case, cultural context is important, and in Swedish culture, names have a completely different meaning. So perhaps the author simply started a trend to bring back a glorious old name – who knows? And what do you, our dear readers, think about this?
People in the comments were just sarcastic over this story, and even assumed that IKEA marketing namers also use that website actively
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