'Nominative determinism' / Aptronym - name that aptly describes who they are

The name game - the weird science of nominative determinism

Roger Highfield
25 Mar 2011

There was a certain scientific inevitability about the news that Rich Ricci of Barclays pocketed a pay and perks bonus package worth around £44 million for last year. This is an example of what is known as nominative determinism, the idea that a person's name reflects key attributes of his job, profession or life.

We all dream of coming up with a phrase or word that spreads like a virus, first attaining the status of pop culture catchphrase and then entering dictionaries and becoming part of the language. That's precisely what happened back in 1994 when New Scientist magazine's Feedback column recounted what happened after we received a new book, Pole Positions: The Polar Regions and the Future of the Planet, by a certain Daniel Snowman.

Two weeks later we were sent a copy of London Under London: A Subterranean Guide. It did not escape our attention that one of the authors was none other than Richard Trench. Then came an article in The Psychologist, in which Jen Hunt of the University of Manchester stated: 'Authors gravitate to the area of research which fits their surname.' Hunt cited an article on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology by J W Splatt and D Weedon. Following the first law of magazine journalism (three mentions make a trend), Feedback devised the term 'nominative determinism'.

We invited readers to give more examples and they poured in. We were told that Ted Fountaine had warned about a water leak at the Open University and that a paper entitled 'Assessing the Recreational Value of Fresh Waters' was written by C J Spray. The finance department of the Environment Agency included a Spendlove, Buck and Price among its staff. The speaker at a City Hall public forum in Brisbane on erectile dysfunction was Ralph Smallhorn. Another reader, Dan Seymour, confessed that he has never quite been able to get over the fact that his father, Hugh Seymour, was an optometrist.

With the rise of the internet, it became easier than ever to mine examples. One respondent trawled through the American Directory of Physicians to reveal a dermatologist called Rash, a rheumatologist named Knee, an orthopaedic surgeon named Bone and a psychiatrist named Couch. There were 18 doctors with the surname of Doctor, 10 named Blood, 19 named Fix, Cure or Heal, and 65 named Flesh, Gore, Ache or Looney.

In 2002, nominative determinism became a serious study in its own right, with the publication of a paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology entitled 'Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions'. On the assumption that 'people prefer things that are connected to the self (for example, the letters in one's name)', authors Brett Pelham, Matthew Mirenberg and John Jones concluded that people are disproportionately likely to 'choose careers whose labels resemble their names (for example, people named Dennis or Denise are over-represented among dentists).'

Then came a twist. What about those people who, contrary to the dictates of nominative determinism, adopt a career that seems at odds with their surname? Take, for example, a consultant urologist at Musgrove Park Hospital in Taunton, Somerset, named Nicholas Burns-Cox. One thing is for sure. There's much more in a name than many of us realise.

Roger Highfield is the editor of New Scientist and, with Martin Nowak, has written Supercooperators: The Mathematics of Evolution, Altruism and Human Behaviour (Canongate, £20)

Source: http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/lifestyle/article-23935283-the-name-game---the-weird-science-of-nominative-determinism.do