ByJason Bittel
Published January 9, 2024
• 7 min read
“I still have people call me and say, ‘Hey, do you know that your name is a bird name?’” laughs Carla Dove.
Fair enough. As the director of the Feather Identification Lab at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., Dove does spend all day, every day thinking about birds—doves included.
Similarly, Greg Pond works as an aquatic biologist, sampling water bodies of the U.S. Northeast for the Environmental Protection Agency.
“My path is water, and all the things that live in it,” says Pond. “And of course, growing up people sometimes gave me the nickname of Pondscum.”
Pond and Dove are what’s known as aptonyms, or people with names that are fit their careers. Historically speaking, being an aptonym (sometimes spelled aptronym) probably would have been much more common than it is today. After all, last names such as Baker, Barber, Butler, and many other surnames originally grew out of a person or family’s occupation.
Today though, Americans especially have more options for work than ever before. So it strikes us as noteworthy when a name just seems to suit a person’s career path perfectly.
“Occasionally I find out that some people think I changed my name because I was so thrilled with my career,” says Betsy Weatherhead, an award-winning atmospheric scientist who has served on NOAA’s Scientific Advisory Group. “And that’s just not the case.”
But all of this does bring up an interesting question—can a person’s name influence the trajectory of their life?
The power of names
While Weatherhead says her last name’s origin has nothing to do with the weather—it’s an old Scottish name that refers to goat herders—the people in her hometown of Wilmette, Illinois, certainly didn’t know that.
“I grew up in a kind of small town, and I have a whole bunch of brothers and sisters, and we all look alike,” Weatherhead explains.
So people would often say to her family members, “‘Hey, what’s the weather, Weatherhead?’” she says. “And I hated it, because when you’re 11 years old, you want to be known as your unique, individual self.”
In fact, the negative association with her name may have kept Weatherhead out of climatology altogether, if not for a little twist of what you might call aptonymic fate. (Read more about how names influence life decisions.)
After losing her graduate school position in high energy physics because of Reagan-era budget cuts, Weatherhead applied for a summer job crunching numbers for an atmospheric scientist. The job had nearly a dozen applicants, but she was later told by the scientist’s secretary that it was her name that put her application over the top.
The scientist was “walking around going, ‘Weatherhead. Weatherhead. We’ve got to hire her!’”
J. Sook Chung, a scientist at the University of Maryland, remembers a similar moment when standing in front of a search committee for her current position, studying blue crabs.
“One of the blue crab life stages, the adult female, is called sook,” says Chung. “It’s exactly the same spelling.”
As it turns out, sharing the name of the animal she was applying to study was a handy icebreaker.
“I’m joking in saying it, but I was destined to work on blue crabs,” says Chung.
Not everyone sees their name associations as positive or meaningful, of course.
“Lots of people have noticed the seeming bond between my name and my chosen field of study,” says Stephen Pyne, an environmental scientist at Arizona State University and writer who focuses on forests and fire, in an email. “I have to confess I’m not one of them.”
Similarly, Ted Stankowich, an evolutionary behavioral ecologist who studies skunks, says his name has never had a discernable effect on his career.
“I’ve dealt with the last name my entire life, and there have always been nicknames, as you can imagine,” he says. “But no, it was never a consideration.”
What’s in a name?
Interestingly, there may be some identifiable psychology at work.
For instance, in a 2015 study published in the journal Self and Identity, Brett Pelham, a professor of psychology at Montgomery College in Maryland, used census data to look for evidence of implicit egotism, which is when someone gravitates toward people, places, or things that resemble them. And some fascinating trends emerged.
“We found that for last names that are also occupations—so Butcher, Baker, Carpenter, Miner, Mason, Porter, Painter, etc.—men with that last name were pretty noticeably over-represented in those occupations,” says Pelham.
“In that same paper, we found that people are about 6.5 percent more likely to marry another person if that person’s birthday number is the same as their birthday number, relative to chance expectation,” he says.
Another intriguing note? Men named Cal and Tex were more likely to move to California and Texas. Another of Pelham’s studies found an uptick in likelihood that a person named Dennis or Denise would become a dentist, as opposed to a lawyer.
Pelham cautions that the effects seen in these kinds of studies tend to be small.
Even so, “if you look at the entire data set, all the vast literature in social and cognitive psychology, there’s evidence that we certainly don’t always have free will.”
Common threads
In addition to getting asked if they’ve legally changed their names, people with aptonyms tend to have amusing experiences in daily life.
“I always go into class on the first day and write down my name and then say, ‘No, this is real,’” says Frank Fish, a marine biologist at West Chester University in Pennsylvania.
Fish says his name also complicates things he needs to do for his work, such as call aquariums.
“I call up and say, ‘I’d like to speak to your director of research,’ and they go, ‘And what’s your name?’ And I say, ‘Frank Fish’, and there’d be a pregnant pause,” he laughs.
For better or worse, most of the people interviewed say that having an aptonym has led to notoriety in their field.
“There’s a pretty famous atmospheric scientist whose name is Carl Buontempo,” says Weatherhead. “He’s from Italy, and in Italian, ‘Buontempo’ means ‘good weather’.”
At conferences, it’s even become a thing where people try to get a picture of Weatherhead and Buontempo together.
“Most people have to work really hard and do a few phenomenally good things in science to be remembered,” jokes Weatherhead.
“But people just kind of naturally remember me, which I’m grateful for.”
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