When Your Name Is Your Job

For several years, the most senior judge in England and Wales was a man called Igor Judge. The fastest human being ever timed is called Usain Bolt. In 1977, the British Journal of Urology published a paper on incontinence by two doctors named Splatt and Weedon.

You can’t make these up, which is exactly why people collect them.

A name that suits its owner’s job or character is called an aptronym, a word usually credited to the American newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams, who apparently spent a good deal of time noticing these things. The Splatt and Weedon paper, meanwhile, helped launch a bigger idea. In 1994, the “Feedback” column of New Scientist magazine began collecting examples and gave the phenomenon a grander name: nominative determinism, the notion that your name might actually nudge you towards your career.

That’s where it gets interesting, because the second idea is a claim, not just a joke, and claims can be tested.

In the early 2000s, a team of psychologists published research suggesting that people really were drawn to things that resembled their own names. Their most famous finding was that people called Dennis or Denise were slightly more likely than you’d expect to become dentists. The theory, called implicit egotism, was that we have a subtle fondness for anything that reminds us of ourselves, including the sound of our own names.

It was a lovely result, widely reported, and the sort of thing that gets repeated at dinner parties for years. Then, in 2011, another researcher went back over the data and found that most of the effect could be explained by other factors, such as which names happened to be popular in which years and among which groups. The Dennis effect, it turned out, was mostly an artefact of how the counting had been done.

Which doesn’t mean names never matter. There’s some evidence that people notice and remember a fitting name, and a doctor called Payne probably gets a few more jokes in the waiting room than most. But the strong version, where your surname quietly steers you into a career, looks a lot more like coincidence plus selective attention. We remember Igor Judge. We don’t remember the thousands of judges called Smith, or the people called Judge who became accountants.

That’s the part I find most useful. Aptronyms are fun precisely because they confirm a pattern we enjoy, and we’re very good at noticing the hits and ignoring the misses. It’s the same instinct that makes a horoscope feel accurate, or a sales figure look like a trend when it’s really noise. A good story with a few striking examples can feel like proof, even when the numbers underneath it are thin.

So enjoy the aptronyms. Collect them, by all means; I do. Just remember that the most interesting thing about them isn’t what they say about names. It’s what they reveal about us: how readily we see meaning in coincidence, and how a memorable example can do the work that evidence should.