MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR MAJOR

An aptronym is a personal name that is oddly appropriate to that person's line of work. Here are some examples of the amusing connections:

• William Headline was the Washington Bureau chief for CNN news
• Doug Bowser is the president of Nintendo of America
• Chris Moneymaker was the 2003 World Series of Poker Champion
• Thomas Crapper was a sanitary engineer who helped create the flush toilet
• Igor Judge was a Lord Chief Justice of England
• Sarah Blizzard is a meteorologist for the BBC corporation
• Patience Scales was a piano teacher in the San Francisco area

...among many, many others. Inaptronyms are similar, but the term particularly describes ironic names like these:

• Jaime Sin was a cardinal of the Catholic Church
• Grant Balfour is a former MLB relief pitcher
• Robin Mahfood is the CEO of a Christian nonprofit called Food for the Poor.

One interesting psycholinguistic theory that attempts to explain this is called nominative determinism - the hypothesis that people subconsciously move toward jobs that relate to their names because of societal influence and their own sense of self. There have been  studies showing with statistical significance that people with the surnames Cox and Ball are more likely to be urologists and that people named Counsel are more likely to be English barristers. This is incredibly interesting stuff: language really does shape our reality!