For a few years now I’ve noticed a weird phenomena with names where a person ends up in something associated with their name.
The New Scientist has coined the phrase ‘nominative determinism’, and Consuming Experience is a website dedicated to it.
So I’m not the only one who’s noticed.
Nominative determinism was brought home to me when the 6-year-old boy from Colorado was thought to be flying around in his dad’s homemade balloon. The child’s name was Falcon. Apt.
But as later reports reveled perhaps in this case, this was a bird whose wings had been clipped.
I’d been noticing on television, mostly. What I do is I turn to my husband and say hey look at that spokesman! And by the time he’s looked it’s gone.
But last year he did see that the guy doing the Woolworths market updates was called Carrat.
There’s a surgeon in Queensland called John Hack. However, I did come across a heart doctor called Colon, and I suspect he chose cardiology deliberately.
I always wondered if the head of the UK pig industry body was elected for his name: Suckling. That said, I was disappointed when Gary Tennant moved on from the Property Council.
The Queensland Water Commission’s CEO is called Dan Spiller, and in his media release he urges us not to waste a drop of water.
www.consumingexperience.com collects these. One of the more amusing was Dr Richard Chopp of Austin Texas who specialises in vasectomies.
Doctors aren’t the only unfortunate ones to make his list. There is a jazz drummer, Ray Pounds and a guitarist A C Drummer.
Joe Strummer was the lead vocalist, guitarist and bass guitarist for the Clash.
Then there’s New York Times journalist Lee Story and the reporter for Reuters Elaine Lies.
Joseph Heller took ten years to write Catch 22. The only thing I remember from it is the vignette of the child born to a man called Major. He named his child Major, so the poor kid went through life as Major Major. When he joined the army as a private, someone had the idea to promote him to Major Major Major.
In the spirit of Catch 22 and nominative determinism, I think the last word should come from a man called Stan Still, a retired airman from Gloucestershire, England.
“When I was in the RAF my commanding officer used to shout, ‘Stan Still, get a move on’ and roll about laughing,” he said.
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