By
Harry Mount
Last updated at 2:01 AM on 27th December 2011
Now, be honest. Wouldn’t you feel a tiny bit reassured if the doctor who was about to operate on your head was called Dr Brain? Or if the judge in your court case was called Lord Chief Justice Judge?
Both men do — or did — really exist. Russell Brain (1895-1966) was Britain’s leading neurologist after the war, as well as being Winston Churchill’s doctor; and Igor Judge has been the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales since 2008.
Well, it has now emerged that the connection between a person’s name and their job isn’t as coincidental as it sounds. New research into the repeated occurrence of ‘aptronyms’ — that is, names that are aptly suited to their owners — has uncovered a possible link between name and destiny.
Apt: Usain Bolt, Bob Flowerdew and William Wordsworth - just three people whose names seem to have an odd synchronicity with their chosen fields
So there are very good reasons why Bob Flowerdew ended up as an expert panellist on Gardeners’ Question Time, why Alan Ball grew up to play for England in the 1966 World Cup-winning team and why Usain Bolt is the fastest 100m runner in the world.
The idea that names and jobs, or characteristics, are connected has been around for centuries. As early as 1678, John Bunyan wrote The Pilgrim’s Progress featuring a cast of characters with names such as Mr Talkative and Mr Worldly Wiseman.
In 1952, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung proposed a theory, ‘the compulsion of the name’. Jung pointed out that the connection between a man’s name and his profession, or his peculiarities, often amounted to a ‘gross coincidence’ beyond the realms of mere chance.
At the time, Jung’s lawyer was called Rosstäuscher (‘Horsetrader’), the local obstetrician was called Kalberer (‘Calver’), and the country’s food minister was a Herr Feist (‘Mr Stout’).
Jung went on to note that the great psychologist Sigmund Freud (whose surname means ‘joy’) specialised in the pleasure principle, and that Jung himself — whose name means ‘young’ — championed the idea of rebirth.
Born for the job: Sir Igor Judge, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales
Since then, there has been extensive research into the phenomenon. A recent American academic paper, in the Journal Of Personality and Social Psychology, explains that your surname may not quite be your destiny, but that a surname connected to a particular job or career is still much more likely to draw you to that profession.
The paper — Why Susie Sells Seashells By The Seashore — concluded that we are disproportionately likely to ‘choose careers whose labels resemble our names’, such as dentists called Dennis or Denise.
There is no way of proving exactly why the phenomenon happens, but the paper’s authors, John Jones, Matthew Mirenberg and Brett Pelham, suggested that it’s because of ‘implicit egotism’.
Because we tend to feel positively about things associated with ourselves, we also feel warmly about the jobs associated with our surnames.
This idea, of implicit egotism, goes further than just jobs. The authors of the study also noticed that people are more likely to move to cities whose names are reminiscent of their own names.
People called Louis were disproportionately likely to migrate to St Louis, Missouri; Florences to move to Florida; Georges to Georgia; Kenneths to Kentucky; and Virgils to Virginia.
Now the connection has been explored
in closer detail by John Hoyland, of New Scientist magazine. He has even
given the phenomenon a new name — ‘nominative determinism’.
Hoyland
was particularly struck by how often the scientific books and articles
he read were written by people with apt names. Once, on the same day, he
came across a paper on incontinence in the British Journal of Urology,
by J.W. Splatt and D. Weedon, and a book about the Arctic by
Daniel Snowman.
‘I do find
it surprising that there are people who go in a direction you’d have
thought their names would have turned them against,’ says Hoyland.
‘There are doctors called De’ath, as well as Pain.’
Hoyland’s research seems to indicate that even if your name isn’t professionally flattering, the tug of the connection is too strong to resist. Unless, of course, it’s all coincidence.
‘Jung is very unsure whether there’s anything significant there, or if it was what he called the whimsicalities of chance,’ says Hoyland.
‘As far as I know, nobody has tried to prove the connection scientifically,’ agrees his New Scientist colleague Graham Lawton, ‘though it might be possible if you had a complete database of people’s names and jobs.’
One of the factors that confuses the whole question of nominative determinism is that — as with all coincidences — we notice an aptronym far more readily than we do a name with no coincidental associations.
So the Today programme received several excited emails when they had Mark Avery, the RSPB’s former director of conservation, on the show, and when Rebecca Morelle, a BBC science reporter, did a broadcast on the fate of our mushrooms.
What’s more, there is an alternative view that reverses the theory. Many of our surnames were originally given to us because of our jobs: Coopers originally made barrels; Smiths were blacksmiths; Millers once worked in mills.
So, instead of our names giving us our jobs, our jobs gave us our names; and it is our family background, the theory suggests, that dictates our careers from generation to generation.
Still, both theories offer us scope for pleasing speculation. How delightful that the managing director of the dairy company Danone is called Bruno Fromage, or that the French national goalkeeper between 1978 and 1981 was one Dominique Dropsy.