The Gravity of Names: Names and Fate

Skip the B.S.

by Skip Eisiminger

“Your parents’ love is expressed in your life; their love for you is expressed in your name.”

—The Wordspinner

“The hand God deals you represents determinism. The way you play your cards represents free will.”

—Norman Cousins

CLEMSON South Carolina—(Weekly Hubris)—2/6/12—The Romans used to say, “Nomen ist omen” or, loosely translated, a name foretells the fate of that which bears it.

Rolf Mengele, the son of the “Angel of Death,” once confessed, “I would have preferred a different father,” or at least a different surname.Life cannot have been easy for the Austrian son of the man who conducted sadistic experiments at Auschwitz. One wonders why he didn’t change his name. I know of one American who adopted his German wife’s surname when they married. The young man was so ashamed of the 2003 invasion of Iraq that he moved to Europe and renounced all connections to his native heath.

Changing a name, it seems, is a form of burning bridges and lengthening the remaining roads.

A German friend of ours divorced her husband when she discovered that he was having an affair. The betrayed mother of four took the bulk of his vast wealth and formally changed her name from “Frau Julia Bayer” to “Fräulein Julia Bay.” She then purchased a ticket on a luxury liner and, since then, has rarely spent any time on land. Once, in port, I asked her if she was so determined to erase all reminders of her husband why had she retained three letters of his name. She said she wanted people to know that, “Er ist weg,” (“He is gone”). Of course, only those who knew her as a “Bayer” would ever understand the sleight of hand but, then, revenge never made anyone rational.

Indeed, naming is often irrational as when the Poole family named their daughter “Sessie Ann” while, behind her back, people called her “Sess Poole.” Try that form of child abuse in Germany, and there’s an excellent chance the name will be rejected by a council that oversees such matters. In the misguided name of freedom, however, Americans allow such parental malfeasance.

I’m just guessing, but perhaps the Pooles were trying to revive the ancient custom of giving children apotropaic names, or unappealinglabels, to ward off evil. “Oedipus” is the classic example, for what God or mortal would be drawn to a child named “Big Foot”? As it turned out, many demons were drawn to the Sphinx-slayer, including his mother, who pierced the boy’s feet and later married him.

I stumbled on the apotropaic class of names when our daughter’s teacher invited me to tell her first-graders the origins of their names. She sent a copy of the class roll home, and I went to work in my dictionaries.

I had warned the teacher that some surnames, especially the Jewish ones, are unflattering, so I told her I would only deal with given names that disguised “a little fairy princess” or “a blessed gift of God.” My carefully laid plans, however, went awry when I came to “Cameron Kennedy,” whose full Scots-Irish name (he has no middle name) means “crooked-nosed boy with an ugly head.” I could just imagine 36-year-olds laughing as poor Cameron sobbed at his desk. So, when the time came for me to reveal the embarrassing name, which I’d saved for last, I apologized and said I’d been unable to find anything.

“Booooo,” the class intoned until I said I had found their teacher’s name.

“What is it?” they demanded, rising to their feet.

“Rebecca, your teacher, was originally a woman who cleaned the cow stalls.” At six,anything remotely resembling a fart joke brings the house down, so I ended on that classy note.

Life would be much easier for name researchers if everyone had a name like Mozart’s.

Apparently, Leopold and Anna Maria were determined to raise a God-loving human because their son’s birth register reads, “Joannes Chrysostomus Wolfgangus Theophilus Gottlieb Mozart.” No, I did not omit “Amadeus”; that was adopted later. The name he was christened with means, “John the Golden Wolfgang, God-loving, God-loving Mozart.” Apparently, part of the boy’s adolescent rebellion included altering his name to “Wolfgang Amadeo,” which morphed into “Amade,” which morphed into “Amadeus” but, regardless of the spelling, “Amadeus,” “Theophilus,” and “Gottlieb” all mean, “God-loving.” In other words, whether The Deity reads Latin, Greek, or German, He will know that Mozart is His golden-haired boy.

The question though is did the name shape the composer? Or, is his music heavenly because his name reiterates his allegiance to God? Of course not, but one is given pause when studying the wonderful list of names that John Train collected for his 1977 book, Remarkable Names of Real People.

Among Train’s discoveries are Cardinal Sin, the Archbishop of Manila, and A. Moron, the Commissioner of Education in the Virgin Islands. I imagine these two men strivingall their lives to prove their names wrong. Apparently, as their titles indicate, both succeeded.

Then there’s Linda Whynot, a prostitute; a Mr. Vice, who was arrested 890 times; and a Dr. Ufelter, a gynecologist.

Though I’m a firm believer in human free will, I can imagine young Dr. Ufelter toying with various specialties before the gravity of his name pulled him into the orbit of his eventual calling. For every patient who thinks Dr. Ufelter is making light of a serious subject, there’s probably another who thinks he’s just in lockstep with his God-determined destiny.

John Hobbes thought that people often make a neat pile of their mistakes and then create a scapegoat called fate. A case in point is Philander Rodman. Philander, Sr. abandoned Philander, Jr., who abandoned Dennis, the basketball star, who married himself because no one loved him more. As I write, Junior has 27 children by four wives and untold girlfriends. Though Philander, Jr. has tried, one shouldn’t blame a name (regardless of its suggestiveness) for a lifetime of infidelity.

Brand and business names, however, are a different story.

In the 40 years that I have lived in the South Carolina upstate, I have seen the following businesses rise and fall: The Greasy Spoon, in Anderson, complete with a sign showing grease dripping from a spoon; Chili Bordello, a Mexican restaurant not far from Greenville’s Bob Jones University; Montezuma’s Revenge, a Mexican restaurant in Seneca; and Smaragda’s Table in Clemson. The latter was a short-lived Greek restaurant that was really quite good, but few who read the sign by the highway knew what it was. I confided my fears to Smaragda and her husband one night, and they just laughed. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that the owners of these four restaurants either wanted their ventures to fail or did not understand that irony and mystery are inappropriate when foreign food is involved.

I am also convinced that names like The Boom-Boom Room, a Simpsonville bar where a man was shot recently, have a gravitational field of their own. I realized this 30 years ago, when I read of a boy who jumped 150 feet to his death into Lake Jocassee, about 20 miles north of here. The road leading to the site of the boy’s last decision is still called Jumping Off Rock Road. In my estimation, that’s criminal.

PS Many thanks to Diana Farr Louis, my fellow WH columnist, for Dr. Ufelter’s name.

(Editor’s Note: Weekly Hubris’s editor, Elizabeth Boleman-Herring, a dual Greek/US national, counts Smaragda Gentile, of the short-lived, eponymous restaurant mentioned above, one of her closest friends in SC: her name means, of course, “Emerald,” in Greek.)