(Roughly) Daily

… maybe, Roger’s Bacon suggests, more than we typically think…

An aptronym is when a person has a name that is uniquely suited to its owner. Some examples:

• Usain Bolt, the fastest human ever
• Mark De Man, Belgian football defender
• William Headline, Washington Bureau Chief for CNN
• Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck, American education professional with a dissertation on uncommon African-American names in the classroom
• William Wordsworth, poet
• Philander Rodman, father of basketball player Dennis Rodman, who fathered 26 children by 16 mothers
• Sue Yoo, attorney

And of course there are also inaptronyms:

• Rob Banks, a British police officer
• Don Black, white supremacist
• Robin Mahfood, President and CEO of Food for the Poor
• I.C. Notting, an ophthalmologist at Leiden University

Maybe this is all coincidence, or maybe it’s nominative determinism, the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names (an idea captured in the ancient Roman proverb “nomen est omen” meaning “the name is the sign”). Psychologist Lawrence Casler proposed three possible explanations for nominative determinism: one’s self-image and self-expectation being internally influenced by one’s name; the name acting as a social stimulus, creating expectations in others that are then communicated to the individual; and genetics—attributes suited to a particular career being passed down the generations alongside the appropriate occupational surname.

But does nominative determinism actually exist—are people with occupation-related names over-represented in those occupations?…

[RB considers the evidence… then ponders a more fundamental issue: “the virtually universal practice of assigning a permanent name at birth”…]

… When naming conventions are created by governments and for governments, they favor legibility and as a consequence, individuality and stability of identity. In my brief heretical statement, I suggested that our modern naming conventions have caused a species-wide shift towards a more narcissistic and egotistical mode of being. Maybe this goes too far (or not far enough…), but the more general idea is that personal nomenclature is never value neutral and never without cultural and psychological ramifications. In other words, we shouldn’t be surprised that our culture has become sterile, stagnant, and individualistic to a fault when those values are embedded in the way we name ourselves.

The global hegemony of governmentally-developed naming systems has crippled our imagination by removing alternative models of nomenclature…

[He considers alternatives with examples from New Guinean and Native American cultures…]

… Naming systems are reflections of a culture’s values, but, as I’ve argued, it’s a two-way street—the way we name ourselves reinforces these values and frames how we think about ourselves and the world around us. When legibility, individuality, and stability of identity are the master values of our personal nomenclature, of course we will look for legible, de-personalized solutions (e.g. technology, laws, governmental programs) to society’s ills (environmental degradation, social isolation and loss of community, mental health and addiction, to name just a few). These solutions are only partial and always will be because they don’t get to the root of the problem: ourselves—who we are as people, what we value, and how we think. There is no shortcut to profound personal change, but a first step in the right direction might make all the difference—if we want to be the kind of people who value community and the natural world and who believe that people can grow and then perhaps we should name ourselves in a way that inspires us to be those kind of people…

A provocative challenge to the way we name ourselves: “Nomen est Omen,” from @RogersBacon1.

* Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet

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As we dig into denotation, we might note that today is a red-letter day for another of the descriptors of our idenitities, one with increasing importance (at least unless we use trustworthy password managers or come up with a better system): it’s Change Your Password Day.

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