from No Uncertain Terms: More Writing from the Popular "On Language" column in the New York Times Magazine by Willaim Safire
Published in Writing Tips on 11/20/2008
I love these columns even when I disagree or am disgusted by Safire. If you've never read this column, check out one of these book length collections. It is just such a joy to hang out with someone who loves language this much.
Ask Mr. Maven
“Charles Dickens assigned names to his characters that reflected their personality traits,” writes Jerome Schwartz of Bloomfield, New Jersey. “Such names as Fezziwig, Scrooge, and Bumble come to mind. Can you recall the name of this technique?”
Anthony Trollope did it, too: He named a doctor character Abel Fillgrave, Vessel Association, M.D. The practice of novelists – or the occasion in real life – is the reverse of an eponym, which applies the name of a real person to a noun or verb. (“The nominee was borked.”) And you notice these perfect appellations all the time: There used to be a helpful fellow in the Times's payroll department named Harry Cash, and now there's a clerk here in the Washington bureau named John Files. The head of the Passenger Association, which warned passengers not to climb on bow railings after viewing Titanic, is John Groundwater.
Assuming it all began in Shakespeare, I turned to the Bardophile Jeffrey McQuain, who immediately remembered the superficial Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor and the fast and loose Mistress Quickly in Henry IV, Part 1.
Deeper research found the marriage of name and quality of character in allegories written two centuries earlier: Larry Scanlon, professor of English at Rutgers and editor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer, notes that Constance, the protagonist of “The Man of Law's Tale,” is a model of constancy, and Prudence in another Canterbury tale offers wise advice. At that time, William Langland's Piers Plowman was a farmer whose first name is a play on an earlier Peter, the apolostewhose name comes from the Greek etra, “rock.” In Mathew 16:18, Jesus is quoted as saying, “Thou are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church.” (Plowman's daughter is named Do-Just-So-Or-Thy-Dame-Shall-Beat-Thee, a name that seems to have atrophied over the centuries along with severe parental discipline.)
“The apt word you seek,” McQuain says, “is aptronym, said to be coined by the American newspaper columnist Franklin P. Adams, who in 1938 joined the panel of radio's 'Information Please' “ FPA, as he was called, rearranged the first two letters of patronym, the naming for one's father, to spell apt, with its Latin root for “fasten, attach,” which now means “fitted.”
McQuain, who happened to know about FPA's coinage because his Internet word column is at www.infoplease.com, steered me to Merriam-Webster's What's in a Name? By Paul Dickson. That word maven applies this word to real people with euonymous (a mouth filling word for “apt”) names: Matt Batts, former major-league catcher; I. Bidwell, contractor; Dick Curd, Carnation Milk spokesman; Mike Basset, veterinarian.
“Collecting aptronyms is generally good fun,” Dickson writes, “but gets a bit unnerving when you run into the horrifying apt Will Drop, a Montreal window cleaner who died in a fall; and Wilburn and Frizzel, who on the grim morning of October 6, 1941, went to the electric chair at the Florida State prison.”
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