More on whether a name is destiny: “There was a lot of buzz online a couple months back when an article entitled ‘Moniker Maladies’ made what seemed to many to be a startling claim: Baseball players strike out more often when their names start with ‘K’; Students with the initials ‘C’ and ‘D’ get worse grades than others.
Actually, this effect, known as the ‘name-letter effect,’ has been known for several years. If your name — even your last name — starts with T, you’re more likely to live in Tacoma or Tulsa than San Francisco or Springfield…” (Cognitive Daily)
This is just another example of correlation not being causation. A certain number of correlations will occur by chance. I am more interested in another sort of nominative determinism — anecdotal cases of people’s names being suited to their roles in life. This was popularized by New Scientist in its back pages. The best case of this I ever ran across personally was when I went to a psychiatric conference concerning violence, whose three keynote speakers were Schouten, Swearingen and Blood. Honest.
