All we’re missing now is a doctor called Deadman

Country Living with Francis Farragher

It’s probably a sign of a meandering mind in the run-up to a week’s holidays but over the past few days, I’ve come across this curious phenomenon of people whose names are particularly apt . . . or maybe not . . . for their occupations in life.

This strange little eccentricity of life gives a certain personal branding to one’s occupation and maybe also to the lifestyle of individuals as I discovered in a little accidental browse through the internet last week.

There’s a famous American basketball player, or by now an ex-player probably, by the name of Denis Rodman, who apparently hadn’t met his father for 42 years.

Anyway they finally did manage to meet in the Philippines homeland of his father – a gentleman called Philander Rodman.

Apparently the rambling Philander did his more than his fair share to ensure the continuation of human kind by fathering a total of 29 children. And I just thought to myself, what a wonderful, if slightly vulgar, surname for a man that fathered 29 children – Rodman.

That’s the slightly uncouth bit out of the way, but some time back I recall an article in the Irish Times where reference was made to the spokesman who had to make excuses for the QE2 liner running aground on some lecherous sand bank.

I cod you not, but the spokesman wheeled out to give the party line for the unfortunate liner operators, was none other than one Eric Flounders. You could hardly make it up!

The link between name and occupation has led to the creation of what was decades ago, a new word to the English language – aptronyms. Whether you’ll remember the word in two days time (or even two hours) is debatable, but a word it is, to be found in most dictionaries that accept new words once they have been in common usage for a certain period of time.

It has been suggested that people’s names, have in cases, led them into a particular career path, and I’m sure there’s some study out there that will back that up with research, but for whatever the reason, aptronyms do keep on happening.

Going back in literature, there was something entirely appropriate about the creator of The Solitary Reaper or The Daffodils having the name of William Wordsworth although to balance that out the author of The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith, surely should have been crafting jewellery rather than writing poems, plays and novels.

Another name for this is ‘nominative determinism’, and like myself you probably won’t recall that either (I did ‘look it up’) but the Tory party in the UK will remember it well from last year, when one of their foot soldiers defected to the United Kingdom Independence party in what was regarded as a somewhat ill-advised and even reckless move, and so well it might. His name of course had to be, Mark Reckless.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.