On Names
Doing a mental half-gainer after Naomi Klein's Doppelganger
“What variety of herbs soever are shuffled together in the dish, yet the whole mass is swallowed up under one name of a sallet.” - Montaigne, On Names, Chas. Cotton translation
Okay, I gotta admit it: I’ve long had a thing for Naomi Klein, and when her book Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World came out I had to read it. Either I nominated it for the book group I’m in or someone else did. I would have read it anyway. I love her. Anyway: Klein takes off from how she was increasingly confused in the wider culture with Naomi Wolf, who had slowly gone from feminist icon to…whatever you call what she is now: “influencer”? Regressive, neofascist anti-vaxxer? I don’t know. I find it depressing. Klein: “There is a certain inherent humiliation in getting repeatedly confused with someone else, confirming, as it does, one’s own interchangeability and/or forgettableness.”1
While reading Klein’s book I recalled some of the times I’d mixed up names. Sometimes I think it’s sheer laziness on my part (yours too?), but I also think we are increasingly exposed to so many names these days we’re bound to get convoluted and intertwingled every now and then. Recently I had realized I was reading two different left-ish culture critics and writers instead of one guy: Branko Milanovic and Branko Marcetic are different people! “He” was simply “the Branko M-ich” guy until I realized…
I had read a lot of literary journalism from the scholar of Literary Modernism/OSS-linked biographer of James Joyce, Richard Ellmann, whose bio of Joyce is often named with Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson as the most influential biographies of all-time. But later I realized some of this was Richard Elman, one enn, one ell: a novelist, journalist, poet and teacher. Different dudes. I only know of one Ellmann who writes. Turns out there are two, both named Richard. Perhaps there are Richard Ellmans I haven’t found yet? Why did I not notice the doubled letters not being there with the novelist guy? What are some of your own examples? I admit I thought the second one-enn/one-ell guy’s style-change kinda vexing until I realized…
Here’s a question for you: How many people with the last name “Brodie” do you know? I know no one personally with that name, but I’m a film noir fanatic, so I know Steve Brodie from a number of wonderful noirs (Out of the Past, Armored Car Robbery, Desperate, Crossfire). Then around a year ago I was reading a bunch of stuff about the discovery of peptides and the endorphin system, and I glommed on to Candace Pert, who had a wonderful terrible genius life. She worked under the venerable neuropharmacologist Solomon Snyder at Johns Hopkins. Snyder worked under Nobel winner Julius Axelrod, who made seminal contributions around dopamine, catecholmines, epinephrine, and the pineal gland. Axelrod worked under the legendary Bernard Beryl Brodie, who did pioneering work in neurotransmitters, anesthesia, paracetamol, and Tylenol. You say: so fucking what? That’s just another Brodie. He doesn’t have the same first name as your noir dude. Oh, but for some reason his friends called this Brodie “Steve.”2
In 1886 an earlier Steve Brodie claimed to have jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge and survived. An early influencer, this Steve Brodie was responsible for that time you went head-over-heels in a bicycle crash: it was called “doin’ a Brodie” when I was a kid. Or maybe you just took a flying leap at something that seemed a last-ditch effort: a Brodie. I think I first encountered this Steve Brodie when Bugs Bunny mentioned him.
So: I can’t think of any other Brodies off the top of my head (maybe the old 49ers QB from the 1960s, John Brodie), but here there are: three all-Steve Brodies. Perhaps the notoriety of the Bridge-jumper (he probably didn’t jump but wanted people to think he did) influenced the other two.
This seems weird to me, but not as weird as nomen est omen, or “nominative determinism,” “the name is the sign,” the idea that your name influences who you become as a person. Which seems, on the face of it, insane.
Nominative Determinism
I live near Santa Rosa, California, and when I listen to local radio stations I’ll often hear an ad for Grab ‘N Grow, a company run by Soiland. Started in 1962 by Marv Soiland, the Soiland Company specializes in soil, mulch, and compost. Their motto “We’re as old as dirt.” Why did Marv get into this business of dirt? You wonder. This reminds me of a George Carlin bit: there was someone who cleaned up in dirt farming, but later the market went south and he took a bath and had to wash his hands of the whole thing.
This phenomena got a lot of play from a 1994 New Scientist article about a polar explorer named Daniel Snowman, and two urologists named Splatt and Weedon, although Jung was interested in this (of course) and noted his former mentor, Freud, who studied pleasure, had a name that means “joy” in German.
The bass player for Rush, Geddy Lee, wrote about his Jewish heritage and the Holocaust in his autobiography. He cites the Bronfman family in Canada: a Moldovan Jewish Canadian family of bootleggers in the 1920s. They later morphed into Seagram’s, went legit. Bronfen is an old Yiddish word for booze, moonshine, spirits. Lee cites Prohibition scholar Daniel Okrent: “It was almost fated that the Bronfman family would make its fortune from alcoholic beverages.”3
Freud’s disciple and writer on sex, Karen Horney? Michael Pollan, who writes prolifically on flowering plants? The misanthropic writer Will Self? Self wrote about Wittgenstein’s ideas about how your name might influence your personality. The botanist who discovered the sexual-reproduction parts of the flower: Nehemiah Grew. Agnes Arber was an early 20th century botanist. A few months ago I was reading on intellectual culture and in a George Scialabba essay he wrote about a Neo Conservative intellectual who can’t stand intellectuals, calling them “feckless, resentful, unworldly, and power-hungry.” His name: Robert Conquest.4 There was a pretentious asshole at Harvard who kept women out of the Experimental Psychology department, because this guy, Edward Boring, thought it was a man’s discipline.5 There’s a theory about the earliest singing ever done on planet Earth: by a specific weird fish, and the idea comes from Cornell professor Andrew Bass.6
Three names of the fastest male sprinters over the past 50 years: Houston McTear, Harvey Glance, and Usain Bolt.
In researching all things Giordano Bruno I can’t help but think about one of heaviest persecutors of Bruno for his ideas: Cardinal Severina.
A name-story that I find haunting: the lead singer of the hair metal band Warrant took a rock star name: Janie Lane. His parents, the Oswalds, had named him John Kennedy Oswald; he later changed it to John Patrick Oswald. A “pretty” man, Janie Lane later told a story to intimates about a famous musician and that musician’s manager on the Hollywood metal scened who drugged him and raped him just after Lane arrived on the Sunset Strip metal scene. A well-liked and talented musician, he drank himself to death at age 47. As far as I know, this story/case/allegation is still a mystery. I wonder about how having the name John Kennedy Oswald may have scarred him in some way; maybe I’m just reading too much into it, like some cut-rate palm reader.
One of the most informed writers on how the nuclear stockpile and our readiness to start nuclear war threatens all living things: Elaine Scarry. In Austin, Texas, there’s a doctor who specializes in performing vasectomies: Dr. Richard (“Dick”) Chopp. The guy who invented the hottest pepper in the world, the Carolina Reaper, is named Ed Currie.
There seems to be more surgeons named Dr. Pain than statistical chance would allow, but who knows what’s really going on?
Any one of us can name a few more I haven’t mentioned. Are these all merely a coincidence? What precise mechanisms would explain this? If you do a deep dive into nominative determism you will read articles about how there are statistically more dentists with the first name Dennis, and how if you’re a Baker you’re almost more likely to bake.
It can get perilous. A man changed his name to Beezow Doo-Doo Zoppity Bop-Bop and was arrested for a drug offense. On the other hand, Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck, a truly Pynchonian name, earned her PhD in Higher Education. Her dissertation was on uncommon black names in the classroom.
How Might Nominative Determinism Work?
We’re not noticing all those people whose name has nothing to do with their occupations or ideas. So, clearly there is no “determinism” here. At the same time, I wonder if some poetic aspect of words, in some farther-flung Whorfian sense, work on some people’s subconscious and it influences them, while if you ask them, they say their name had nothing to do with why they pursued this or that line of work. Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Igor Judge, said his name had no influence in his pursuit of the law; a weather reporter named Storm Field said the same, although his father, Frank Field, also a weatherman, influenced him. All dad had to do was add the Storm, and voila! Perhaps there are some forces of convergence also.
In all, these names and occupations are good for a laugh, and seem to function in the way that Henri Bergson said humor works: it reminds us that a lot of the time we’re acting as if we have no agency. Humor wakes us up to this. We are not robots, though a disconcerting amount of time we act like we are. As Oliver Hardy so often said to Stan Laurel: “Now see what you made me do!”
Brief Remarks on Having a Boring Name
This past October 23rd, 2025 I watched Jeopardy! (being an incurable addict) and one of the contestants was a long-hair, uniquely dressed young man with a baritone voice, who identified as a poet. His name: Elijah Perseus Blumov. I was quite jealous. Of his name. (By the way: he didn’t win, though I was rooting for him and his name.) I’ve long wondered how to get out of the bland anonymity of my birth name: Robert Michael Johnson. I was named after my dad, but mom and dad called me by my middle name. Currently Johnson is still running second to Smith for surnames in the US. I write a lot about Wilson, whose name is 14th on the latest census list, behind Gonzalez, but just ahead of Anderson. One of my best readers of this Substack is Jackson, currently number 19. Another is Campbell, who comes in at number 47 as of the 2020 census. If any Williamses, Browns, Joneses, Garcias or Millers are here: welcome! You too, Davis, Rodriguez and Martinez.
The philosopher and Leibniz scholar Justin Erik Halldor Smith later just signed his articles Justin EH Smith, but now he’s Justin Ruiu, and he explains why here.
When I was in junior high school there were three Mike Johnsons, including myself. It was then (age 14) when I realized I had to deal with this horrible name. If I go by my birth certificate, I’m Robert Johnson, who…is the king of blues guitar. He went down to the crossroad, fell down on his knees, made some sorta deal with Satan to become the best guitarist, and it worked. Okay!
I had a doctor who made the same “Do you play blues guitar?” joke every time I saw him. He just must’ve forgot, for obvious reasons. What’s weird is: yes, I do indeed play blues guitar. I know the current leader of the fascist party in the House has my name, but it will blow over. For awhile, Michael Johnson was the fastest man in the world. You probably know someone else with my name. Naomi Klein? You had just enough Naomi to get into trouble with another one. My troubles along these lines are relatively dull.
When I got married in Hawaii there were a few options for changing your name with marriage, but one that they didn’t allow in that state was for the man to take his wife’s last name, which I actually tried before they told me I couldn’t do it. I couldda been Michael Canada. I couldda been a contenduh!…for something less forgettable.
I’ve long thought of just adopting a nom de plume, and I can’t give you a good reason why I haven’t yet. Perhaps on some level I’m too mired in the name. There’s so many of us it has a certain black hole-gravitational pull to it. Or seems to. This lifelong name is getting me almost zero traction as a writer. So: maybe I should find something more memorable, more musical or picturesque or grotesque or poetic. Right now I’m partial to Elijah Perseus Blumov, but I hear it’s already taken.
I sometimes wonder if I became a Generalist because of my name. Ya know, like Dr. Dick Chopp, became the vasectomy king?
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein, p.27
If anyone reading this is interested in how influential first-person chains of scientific research works you might do no better than read Apprentice To Genius, by Robert Kanigel, which goes into great detail about why one location (Johns Hopkins) could generated Brodie to Axelrod to Snyder to Pert.
My Effin’ Life, Geddy Lee, p.15
What Are Intellectuals Good For?, George Scialabba, p.162. Also see, p.49, and the oft-complaining Walter Karp and writers who end up writing about what their names sound like. Scialabba links this to Derrida’s ideas.
https://daily.jstor.org/gatekeeping-psychology/
Addendum: And of course, I have known a Robert Johnson, too. Robert Grady Johnson was convicted of murder in a bank robbery in Oklahoma, although there is some doubt whether he was present at the bank. The murders book place in the county where I worked as a newspaper reporter, and I once traveled to a prison to interview that particular Robert Johnson.
This is the case:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geronimo_bank_murders
I can relate to a lot of what you wrote. I, too, have a boring name, and that has made me jealous of people with interesting names. And I’ve also noticed people who have “my” name, without really looking for them. There’s a “Tom Jackson” who was an NFL linebacker; a “Tom Jackson” who was the head of the postal workers union in Great Britain; rock singer Tommy James has my birth name, Thomas Jackson, and on and on and on. I suspect many people reading your piece know a “Michael Johnson.” I have a cousin named Michael Johnson.
One aspect of having a boring name is that I often get emails that were obviously meant for someone else. I was apparently an early adopter of Gmail, so I didn’t have to use a numeral along with my name, just my name. So I get all kinds of emails, from all over the world, from somebody who was trying to write to another “Tom Jackson” and who forgot to include a number in the email address. Some of these I can just ignore, but some of them I feel I ought to answer. I got an email from Australia the other day, asking me to authorize something for a medical procedure. I felt compelled to let them know I wasn’t the person they meant to reach.
If I had followed your attempted strategy of taking my wife’s last name, my name after marrying my first wife would have been “Thomas Thomas.” After marrying the second one, I would have been “Thomas Richey.”
Woody Allen once wrote that the Russian Revolution picked up steam when many people suddenly realized that the “Tsar” and the “Czar” were the same person. If you have an interest in Russian classical music, as I have, searching for particular composers in music streaming services can be a challenge. Am I looking for “Myaskovsky” or “Miaskovsky”? At least for the most popular composers, there is general agreement that the English spelling is “Prokofiev,” for example. But not always!