Wednesday, March 20, 2002
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Wednesday, March 20, 2002 |
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Oh sing a song of aptonyms By
SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
We've all got one in fact, most of us have two or three. More than that and you need hyphens to hold them together. Names are here to stay. When a village got too many "Johns" to keep them straight, folks individualized them by physical characteristics or occupation or paternity. John the Short. John the Weaver. John, Richard's son. Monarchs with a dozen baptismal names are remembered by a single telling descriptive: Ivan the Terrible. Katharine the Great. Today? George the Bemused and Richard the Undisclosed? I collect names, torn from obits or jotted on envelopes that invariably get discarded. Some engage me for no reason I can explain like the name of the genial-appearing Gander, Newfoundland, policeman in the AJC last week. His name is Ozzy Fudge. That makes me laugh as much now as when I first saw it under his picture. My parents spoke of a woman they knew named Augusta Gale. I knew a Sandy Pyle in college, and recently noticed the wistful name of Sherwood B. Fein. Spell-check works its own distorted humor on proper names, substituting "Ohm meter" for the name of our late friend Bill Ohmsieder. Our son-in-law, Brian Withnell, was "withheld." Full disclosure requires me to report that when I write Satterthwaite, spell-check thinks I probably mean "scatterbrain." There is a name for the names that tickle me the most, although as a coined word, its correct spelling is in doubt. "Aptonym" or "aptronym"? Neither got into my Webster's or my American Heritage, so pick one. An aptonym is a name that is peculiarly suited to its owner because of his or her occupation or some other characteristic. An apt name, as it were. My personal favorite through the years has been the honest-to-goodness name of the Dean at Gettysburg College in the mid-1950s: Seymour B. Dunn. Apt aptonyms have the most fun with the professions. I read of a swimmer who went from gold fillings to Olympic gold. Mark Spitz had planned to be a dentist. My husband Dave had a dentist named Stonebreaker when he was a kid, but a Dr. Comfort has been drilling in Haddonfield, N.J., for 25 years that we know of. Used to be a Washington, D.C. orthodontist named Brace, too. Were they victims of nominative count, but I never expected to see an odd name like my own until I did a vanity search on the Internet one day. A woman with my name my exact, archaically spelled name is a technical writer in Concord, Mass. It was like finding a missing twin I didn't know I had. We corresponded briefly, sharing astonishment, and I was oddly pleased to discover that I'd owned the name considerably longer than she had. If anyone ever questions my authenticity, I can cite seniority. When she didn't answer a note, I concluded that the improbable collision of our lives was over. Months went by, and then came a morning when I checked e-mail to find emblazoned across the top of one message: "Sallie Boring Satterthwaite." "Huh!" I thought. "Somebody didn't like a column." Then I read the note: "Remember me? Changed e-mail accounts and just found your address again." Boring was my shadow's maiden name. Some aptonym sources: www.wordsmith.org/awad/awadmail63.html and www.m-w.com/lighter/name/aptronym.htm.
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