CALL ME SNAKE

A name is more than just an arbitrary label. It shapes your life and, to a large extent, your occupation. If you don’t believe me, just see the latest issue of the Annals of Improbable Research where you’ll find a fascinating article on the “Name Number” for geology and other professions written by an award-winning journalist. (I can already anticipate the question: No, I did not write this fascinating article. It was written by Kevin Krajick, who has won several journalism awards, including one that he won twice, which still counts as two awards, even though it’s the same one.) In this article, Krajick refers to “Nominative Determinism”–the fact that many people’s names are “spookily related” to their profession. This, of course, is the very same phenomenon I just described a few sentences ago. (The similarity is “spooky,” if not uncanny.) Here are some examples that Krajick cited: Forrest Hall and Robert Forrest in the field of forestry; Vernon Byrd and John Wingfield in ornithology; Kathleen Weathers and John Weatherly in meteorology; and Ken Drinkwater and Andrew Fountain in oceanography/hydrology. To this list, I’d like to add some additional names: Albert Einstein, genius, and Eugene Shoemaker, geologist.