For example, I was doing research for a blog article and found a paper by a guy named Christian Messenger. That man was definitely destined for missionary work, but the paper was about football.
It can’t be real.
There’s the newspaper columnist with the world’s record highest IQ, Marilyn vos Savant. In French, you can read her name as “your (plural) scholar/scientist.” When I was a kid, I was sure that it was a pen name, but it turns out it’s actually her mother’s maiden name.
There’s a government spy project called Palantir. Kind of on the nose to LOTR nerds like me. For those who don’t know, the palantirs were the crystal balls in LOTR that wizards could use to communicate or remote view what other palantirs could see.
I work in dairy company, once I was checking SAP for something and saw a name-surname “Olgun Erkek” (Mature Male in Turkish). We are receiving his raw milk, it is like porn name when you picture it like that.
There is a doctor near us named Dr. Owi.
Wolfgang Wolf was at some point manager of German club Wolfsburg!
The original head of Teslas autopilot division is named Andrej Karpathy. car-path-y
When I was a kid, my parents were thinking about building a house. The name of the contractor who was helping them was named “Kari A Hammer.” I might be spelling it wrong (I was eight), but that was his actual name.
I like to think he wanted to be a tattoo artist or something and hated carpentry, but was forced into it because of his name.
These are called “aptroynms” and Wikipedia has a great list of them and also inaptroyms. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aptronym
See also: Nominative Determinism. If I remember correctly, there was a subreddit about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism
Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names. The term was first used in the magazine New Scientist in 1994, after the magazine’s humorous “Feedback” column noted several studies carried out by researchers with remarkably fitting surnames. These included a book on polar explorations by Daniel Snowman and an article on urology by researchers named Splatt and Weedon. These and other examples led to light-hearted speculation that some sort of psychological effect was at work.
There’s now a Lemmy community too: !nominativedeterminism@feddit.uk
Yes, I’m searching through this thread for stuff to post there
I had a taxi driver once who’s last name was snel. Which is Dutch for fast or quick or speed.
Kid at school named Miles Long.
I just saw him on pornhub.
I used to work in a call center and once took a call from a guy named Jacob J. Justice. Guy should’ve been a Marvel superhero.
I work in a 911 dispatch center, we used to have a frequent caller in our area whose first name contained the word “trash,” and, well, they were trashy. We had cops there pretty much every day for some dumb trashy domestic bullshit.
Also took a call from a guy who’s name was very similar to “Roger Rogar.” Not his actual name, given the nature of my job I don’t want to give out any potentially identifiable information about my callers, but same basic pattern, first name exactly the same as his last name except for one letter and, at least as well as I could hear over the phone, pronounced exactly the same.
Also a truly dumbfounding amount of girls named things like princess and diamond.
There’s an HGTV person named Page Turner.
Lots of nominative determinism in this thread.
11 hours in and no Usain Bolt???
