Are you who you say you are?

Are you who you say you are?

Ever lie awake at night, wondering how the hell you got where you are today? Worrying perhaps whether you have really been the master of your own fate or whether mere circumstance and bad luck has buggered (I meant to write ‘buffered’ here, but my fingers accidentally changed places on the keyboard) you along carelessly through most of your pointless existence? What preternatural sequence of events might have led you to become a taxidermist living in Catford? Well, if your name is Catherine Stuff-Buttock then I may well have the answer.

You have played into the hands of a spooky phenomenon called nominative determinism. One of the first people to start pondering it seriously was Carl Jung in Synchronicity. Here, he questioned whether names really could have power of direction over people, creating what he termed “meaningful coincidences”, or whether these occurrences were purely “whimsicalities of chance”. In the 1970s, a chap called Lawrence Casler wrote a paper for New Scientist entitled ‘Put the Blame on Name’, arguing there is strong evidence that people can indeed be influenced in their life choices by their names. His hypothesis made the world stop and think. Well, perhaps not the world, but losers like me starting looking into it. Here are some of my favourite examples of nominative determinism, or aptronyms, as they are otherwise known.

Thomas Crapper, eminent Victorian and populariser of the toilet

Bernie Madoff, in prison for a squillion years for making off with £170 billion of other people’s money

Sgt. Brandon Slaughter, currently serving in the US army in Iraq

K. A. Crotchfelt, author of a paper for the Journal of Clinical Microbiology entitled ‘Chlamydia trachomatis infection in urine samples from women and men attending sexually transmitted disease clinics’

Professor Alan Heavens, cosmologist and Professor of Theoretical Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh

Rob Bottin, expert in animatronics and special effects, creator and designer of Robocop

Jimmy Choo, designer of fabulous tarts’ trotters

Desiré Tits, author of La Formation de la Jeunesse, a work of what must be some great genius, published in Brussels in 1945.

Michael Pollan, author of The Botany of Desire, which explains how plants cunningly attract humans to ensure their long-term survival

And finally, Lord Justice Judge, Deputy Chief Justice of England and Wales