Implicit Egotism & Nominative Determinism - A Working List Challenging the Notion of Free Will

 The Point of this post is to serve as a working list of real life examples where people's names seem oddly deterministic to their lives. As weak psychological effects, they are a personal curiosity, and I'd like to remember them after noticing them.

Derek Chauvin:

            The now famous police officer responsible for the death of George Floyd, an event which had reverberations around the world, has an unfortunately coincidental name. I could not help but notice that the racist intentions which have been cast against Officer Chauvin are made in the interesting political light of the current moment, where is being used as an example of the problematic alignment of police officers with certain white-national and jingoistic ideologies. The question then becomes, does/did this officers namesake influence his personality in any way - was the death of George Floyd a result of an overly chauvinistic officers abuse? It's impossible to say for sure, but is perhaps an interesting exercise in character study on its own. 

            Going down the rabbit hole, we discover that the term "chauvinistic" itself is reportedly an eponym for a soldier named Nicholas Chauvin that served in Napoleon's army. This is apocryphal, but as a veteran he was noted to be extremely doting to Napoleon I. The actual historical truth of this has not been verified and it is believed that the name was utilized mainly as a post-war folklore invention in much the same way we understand Rosie the Riveter today. His character manifested into the public conscious as a character in an 19th century play by the Cogniard Brothers call La Cocarde Tricolore. In it, Nicholas Chauvin is caste as a young naive soldier learning blind and aggressive acts of patriotism, the actions that would ultimately become the root of the eponym chauvinistic. In the wake of the play, the word become synonymous with zealous military pride, but has since been expanded semantically to encompass any form of bigotry or bias; although nowadays it is often used to indicate particular distaste for women. In the modern expanded use of the word however, it can be used to refer to any sort of strong biased opinion, suggesting a possible role for nominative determinism. 

            Again, this is highly speculative, but nonetheless at least slightly interesting and worth considering some ramifications. Where previously cases have been made defending reckless behavior as esentially blameless based genetics or "affluenza" being a limiting factor, it's interesting to conider if a case based on Nominative Determinism could diminish the blame that Derek Chauvin holds for his own actions against George Floyd. In the same way that someone named Micheal Judge might be influeced to become a lawyer based on his name, could Derek Chauvin - in some small way - be a victim to his own namesake via the influence of Nominative Determinism? 

Piper:

            I met an acquaintance recently who, when challenged to a tongue twister, responded so quickly and flawlessly in rattling off several increasingly convoluted sentences that it demanded an immediate explanation. No one can be so savant at something so obscure and not explain herself. 

            The girls name is "Piper" and after shocking all of us she explained that when she was a child she was made fun of in various joking ways about how she should be able to play the flute, command rats, or at minimum know the famous tongue twister:

                   A peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked; 

                   If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, 

                   Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper picked?

            Of course if that's her name she must know the rhyme! And so, with pressure from her classmates and her teacher, and with the building sense of necessity to achieve one's destiny, Piper memorized her first tongue twister. She recited it to her teacher, who was impressed, and so challenged her to another tongue twister, and then another; so on and so forth. And so now whenever the topic of tongue twisters arises, Piper stands at the ready to perform her destined role to crescendo:

                    A tutor who tooted the flute,

                    Tried to tutor two tooters to toot.

                    Said the two to the tutor:

    
                    "Is it harder to toot or

                    To tutor two tooters to toot?"

                                        (Applause erupts)

           Additionally, Piper does like to travel, and interestingly the modern interpretation of the classic folklore is that it is a story about a traveling "lokator" who may have helped the town before encouraging the youth of the town to emigrate to burgeoning regions of Europe. So her namesake may have belonged to someone who would have often travelled and wandered around Europe. Whether or not she knows that or the other darker interpretations of the tale, I don't know. It's still interesting to note here how 1) her name changed the way people treated her and thus directed her behavior in certain ways 2) again, a folklore tale has influenced a person's life in strange ways. Joseph Campbell would be proud.

Terry Boot and Peter Foot:

        What are the odds that two consecutive executives at the UK sneaker outlet "ShoeZone" would have such 'well fitted' names - "Terry Boot replaces Peter Foot at Shoe Zone". The next CEO should be a "shoe-in" for a spot on this list.

        It would be interesting to know what the histories of these two individuals is in order to search for some "confirmation" as to whether or not their names had any long term influence on their trajectories in life. What little info there is online about both men does not suggest that either had any particular predilection for our lowest appendages, so this may be nothing more than amusing coincidence...or, Nominative Determinism is afoot!

Master and Johnson:

        Who could imagine a better dynamic-duo than Master & Johnson to head the field of sexual dysfunction research. This comedic-level, euphemistic pairing of brains that first set out to categorize the human sexual response are now famous. One really could not imagine a better combination. 

       Unbelievably, Masters (a Gynecologist) and Johnson (a female singer turned "Sexologist") "set about to study the structure, psychology, and physiology of sexual behavior, through observing and measuring masturbation and sexual intercourse in the laboratory... Together they developed polygraph-like instruments that were designed to measure sexual arousal in humans. Using these tools, Masters and Johnson observed and measured about 700 men and women who agreed to engage in sexual activity with other participants or masturbate in Masters' laboratory." - aka the "Masterbatory"...I'll see myself out. 

    The jokes truly write themselves so I won't go on.

    This pair of "Pecker Peepers" (I lied) were no strangers to Freud either, as their work modeled notions that Freud had first established - mainly the distinction between male and female orgasm. I like to imagine that Freud could have foreseen - like some Nostradamus - that eventually two brains (Compelled by Nominative Determinism?)  bearing sexually suggestive names would eventually merge to birth new theories about sex. As a result, they developed a highly successful form of talk therapy. 

Dr. Couch:

    Recently I started medical school and some stress and curiosity led me to make an appointment with the school therapist named (insert drum roll)... Dr. Couch. She has been with the school for more than 10 years and I felt appropriately cared for in our meeting such that you could say she found her true calling in life. At the end of our appointment, I had to ask her if she had ever heard of the concept of Nominative Determinism, to which she responded 'no'. We were both pressed for time so I couldn't probe much further, but if I talk with her again I will certainly ask her if she feels her name influenced her life trajectory, or if maybe she come from a long line of therapists or couch makers.