The Wit’s Guide to Nominative Determinism

Or, nomen et omen

Second only to The Shlump, The Basilisk is Marvel Comics’ primo example of nominative determinism. ("Beware the Basilisk My Son!" - Marvel Team-Up #16, written by Len Wein, art by Gil Kane and Jim Mooney, letters by Artie Simek, colors by Glynis Wein, ©1973 Marvel Comics)

Do people’s names define their life’s trajectory? One of the leading proponents of this theory was Carl Jung, though he only thought of it when he was old. He suggested this in his book Synchronicity, which is also the name of the greatest album by The Police, who never enforced any laws. So the answer is no.

“The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers.”
— Marshall McLuhan

Fittingly, this phenomenon really took off when it found the proper name for itself. At the turn of the last century, they were called aptronyms and made for easy filler in items columns with reports of a cemetery keeper named William Graves and a firm of physicians called Gore & Trueblood. But was it aptronym or aptonym? And what did it mean, again?

“Although my father wanted me to become an engineer and my mother a bishop, I myself am quite contented to have become an adjective.”
— Federico Fellini

The legendary San Francisco columnist Herb Caen (said to have bested Robert Fulford for the longest-running column in the English language) often filled the inches with “namephreaks” such as fisherman Buzz Minnow, dentist Rodney Pain, piano teacher Patience Scales, etc. Obviously, no one has used the term namephreaks since.

“And there’s a nice youngster of excellent pith—
Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith.”
— Oliver Wendell Holmes

Credit for nominative determinism goes to C. R. Cavonius, who submitted the phrase to John Hoyland’s Feedback column for New Scientist magazine in this 1994 column. Therein, it was noted that “Sidney Ray is one of the foremost British authorities on camera optics; R. A. Sparkes has written numerous textbooks on electronics; C. J. Berry is the expert on homemade wines; and Muriel Watt is a leading Australian researcher on solar power.”

“The act of naming is the great and solemn consolation of mankind.”
— Elias Canetti

Once it had the right name, nominative determinism took off. When John Hoyland died in 2014, it was in the headline of his obituary. And people so glommed onto it that New Scientist keeps saying they will no longer accept examples; the deluge continues.

“No, Groucho is not my real name. I’m breaking it in for a friend.”
— Groucho Marx

Despite its technical appellation, nominative determinism is entirely anecdotal. My favourite case: In 1986, the oil magnate Armand Hammer bought a stake in in the company that made Arm & Hammer baking soda because people kept asking if he owned it.

“No good can come of association with anything labelled Gwladys or Ysobel or Ethyl or Mabelle or Kathryn. But particularly Gwladys.”
— P.G. Wodehouse

There is also reverse nominative determinism, wherein the person changes their name to reflect their life’s work. Credit for this joke goes to Yuri Vishnevsky, who gave as his example Benoît Mandelbrot, the mathematician who discovered the recursive geometric shapes called fractals and gave himself the middle initial B, which (per his obituary) maybe stood for Benoit B. Mandelbrot? But the real joke is that this might be a case of reverse reverse nominative determinism, as Arthur C. Clarke pointed out that the Mandelbrot set of fractals contained many mandalas, the circular geometric patterns used in Eastern religions. And what’s more, Nelson Mandela may have enjoyed mandalas!

“A name is a road.”
— Iris Murdoch

And there’s nominative contradeterminism, wherein the person chooses a profession that is the opposite of what their name suggests. In addition to the oft-cited Cardinal Jaime Sin of Manila, I’m partial to Dr. Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck, who devoted her academic study to uncommon names, refused to change hers, and uses neither of those products. Had Vandyck failed in her career, that would have been nominative deterrentism.

“I’ve always thought my creative life began the moment my mother named me Twyla.”
— Winston Churchill (just kidding, obviously Twyla Tharp)

The natural endpoint for this flavour of chicanery is monogrammatic determinism, in which your initials seal your fate. It was briefly found that having positive initials like VIP or ACE caused people to live longer than those with downer initials like PIG or DIE. Upon further review, scientists found that this theory was, like all of the above, quite ridiculous.

“Bob Marley isn’t my name. I don’t even know my name yet.”
— Bob Marley

Has anyone ever cast a Bob Marley impersonator in the role of Jacob Marley in A Christmas Carol? Or a woman named Carol? A free idea I’ll just leave there for the taking. Next week? Is it finally tsundoku time? Loyal supporter M. Louisa Locke, who is not a safecracker, is presumably hoping so!

Each month my paid subscribers and I exchange some of the best things we’ve read, seen, heard, and experienced in a special issue called Get Wit Picks. In my interview with Tom Allen, master trombonist and compiler of the superb Classical Musick Almynack, I asked him about the story of Peter Maxwell Davies, the composer who recovered a swan that had been electrocuted by power lines near his home on the Orkney Islands. As Allen wrote, Davies “kept the wings for a future operatic costume, cooked the liver and was investigated for being in possession of the corpse of a protected species. When officers called, he offered them swan terrine, which, by his own admission, was ‘probably a mistake.’ He was eventually cleared of wrongdoing.”

Was this a knowing homage to Lamb to the Slaughter, Roald Dahl’s famous story of the woman who murders her husband with a frozen leg of lamb and then feeds the weapon to the detectives investigating the case? Said Allen:

“I don’t think so, but I can imagine, had he still been alive, that Alfred Hitchcock could have done something darkly wonderful with the story of a composer, a pair of enormous wings and a terrine.”

Get Wit Quick No. 371 will say this: If you name your son Thelonious Sphere Monk, he’s gonna do something interesting. The mascot is Magnus the magpie, who had to be a magpie with a name like that. The title font is Vulf Sans, the official typeface of the band Vulfpeck. The inferior-for-now and still free AI replicant is at getwitquicker.replit.app. The book was Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. My nickname for you is Tappy, so you’d better tap the ❤️ below.