Open Mike: What's in a Name?

["Open Mike" is the anything-goes Opinion page of TOP, in which Yr. Hmbl. Ed. blows steam off the top of his head. It normally appears on Wednesdays.]

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It's snowing and below freezing here right now. Making me anxious about the health of the delicate blooming plants hereabouts. This is the view through my kitchen window about 80 seconds ago, snapped with the phone and AirDrop'd on to the computer.

Monkeys
I have a sensitivity to a thing I call "American Irony." The examples just pelt me like there's a monkey nearby enthusiastically flinging his dung about, occasionally smiting me on the cheek with a fat wet lump. Example: terrorists attacked the World Trade Center. In response, Bush the Lesser declares "the" War on Terror. To me, this immediately telegraphed that his government intended to use the event as a pretext to do whatever it wanted to. (The salient result of the "War on Terror" was the establishment of a dozen permanent U.S. military bases on Iraqi soil, to enforce the flow of Iraqi oil to the U.S. Everything else about it was gaslight. As ably explained by one of the original founders of movement conservatism who later went renegade, Kevin Phillips.) I went around at the time pointing out that it's meaningless in any normal sense to "declare war" on a condition, like "the war on hunger." At best it merely works at the level of metaphor. "Terror" is a state of mind, a state of being, not an enemy that can be isolated and destroyed. It's not even an enemy that can have intent or agency in any normal sense. As any sensitive child can tell you, you can be terrorized by your dreams.

And then what happened shortly thereafter? As if were, yea verily, a sign from God, batting us upside the chops, a pair of deranged psychopath snipers started randomly murdering ordinary citizens going about their daily business in the environs of Washington, D.C....doing what to the community? Oh, terrorizing it. It was as if the Universe were forcefully making the same point, that terror can come from any quarter at any time.

The really odd thing, well, to me anyway, was that no one seemed to see any connection. Maybe I just think about words too much.

His name is what?
Anyway, it kills me that sometimes American irony can come in the form of a name. It's not always just a joke, as when talk show host Jimmy Kimmel featured a prison guard named Robyn Banks and a urologist who had performed hundreds of vasectomies whose name is Dr. Dick Chopp. For instance, the supposed "smartest woman in the world," so-called because she scored higher on standardized IQ tests than anyone else, is named Marilyn Mach vos Savant. A savant, of course, is a learned person or one in possession of deep, detailed knowledge.

The transgressive non-politician who trumped politics-as-usual and upended all the normal and accepted standards is named...? Well, y'know. Changed when his paternal grandfather Americanized his name from Friedrich Drumpf to Fred Trump. Seriously, Universe? The verb "to trump," of course, means "to override," as when a card of a different suit overrides the suit that was led.

American irony kills me.

And now.... Well, you know what chauvinism is. Wikipedia: "Chauvinism is the belief in the superiority or dominance of one's own group or people, who are seen as strong, virtuous and supreme, while others are considered weak, unworthy or inferior." The word's an eponym, meaning a word that comes from a name. It derives from "Nicolas Chauvin," a fictional character lampooned for excessive patriotism and his devotion to Napoleon in the 1831 play La Cocarde tricolore ("the tri-color cockade") by two brothers named Cogniard.

And now the everlasting symbol of white America with its knee on the neck of black America is a guy whose actual name is Chauvin.

Names are just the tip of the iceberg. Don't start looking around for this kind of irony, is my advice. It gets pretty hard to escape. I should've kept a list. It knows no bounds, and less subtlety. And as with the metaphorical monkey you-know-what, the best advice is, learn to dodge.

Mike 

Books o' the Week

Nikon fan are ya? Nikon: A Celebration by British automotive writer and Nikon collector Brian Long covers the history of the company from its beginnings to the end of the film era. A U.S. parallel with more concentration on opinions about the equipment is B. Moose Peterson's Nikon System Handbook. The 6th Edition covered film equipment up to 2000. <—These are portals to Amazon.com thru TOP; you can also search for Nikon books from The Book Depository, which offers free shipping worldwide.

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Keith: "I once pulled into a parking lot for several businesses that were housed in a strip mall. The dentist office was next door to the meat market. So the sign on the building literally read 'Mr Butcher Dentistry.'"

Jacob: "Here's a nice one: my wife's childhood doctor was Dr. Morgenbesser. In English: Dr. Tomorrow Better."

Comments

[Dan D]

Nice take on the names and subsequent events. Is it ironic or a pointer from a higher source to catch? I guess that would be up to any individual to ponder.

[Phil Martin]

Good points, well made and I agree with them.

[Benjamin Marks]

For years in the late 1950's and 60's the curator of the Arms & Armor collection at the Metropolitan Museum was. . . wait for it. . . Helmut Nickel.

[Kodachromeguy]

Don't forget the "war on crime." It became an excuse to pour money into the prison industrial complex, such that we now incarcerate a larger percentage of our population than any other nation.

[Daniel]

Thinking about Words and their use, I don't have a PIN Number.
I have a PIN for my bank card use but the number does not have a separate number I need to use it.

[Nick]

I've said for a while that the writers of Real Life are hacks, and that they've totally given up of late. I expect the next nationwide criminal manhunt to be for Guy Bigbad and the next awful-but-inexplicably-popular founder of a billion-dollar tech startup to be Broseph Richman.

[c.d.embrey]

Merriam-Webster defines irony as the use of words to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning

Irony is wasted on me—often I just don't get it. Maybe it's just too subtle for the likes of me.

[MikeR]

That useless idiot spoiled a useful word. OTOH, the other guy with the fitting name may have, like an editorial cartoon's stripped-to-its-essence imagery, provided an "Oh. Now I get it" realization of what oppression looks like.

[Grant]

Irony and it's close relative black humour, are coping mechanisms. Relax Mike, take a deep breath, the next Apple event will be better.

[John McMilliln]

We all must have our own lists of American ironies as well as inverted ironies like these. Take my doctors. I've seen a proctologist named Dr. Brown, but you'd expect that. I have another doc named Dr. Mordick. He's not my urologist, but my hand surgeon. My urologist is Dr. Carpenter, so that pair has it all backwards.

Sometimes it seems we're all living in a big Dickens story, where the names comment on the characters. The Chauvin/chauvinist correspondence may be the best example yet.

[robert e]

That's a lovely picture documenting an unlovely event, ironically.

[Charlie Ewers]

Several years ago I had bumper stickers made that say, "I Bid 4NT." Bridge players understand.

[Albert Smith]

The war on drugs sure has, uh, what's the word?... oh yeah, drug on for a long time.

[Kye Wood]

Bang on article Mike. Your writing this past year (especially) has been tip top.

I've had a lot of careers. Navy Intelligence, Telecom Technician, Software Developer and on and on. I, like so many, am basically driven by the desire to help others.

If you, or I, had to make the lives of other people worse, in order to keep our job, then that job simply wouldn't be worth having. End of.

Now, a politician (in my country, just like yours), will, in the main, turn a blind eye to the suffering of others, just to placate their self interested base, in order to keep their job.

So I pity politicians. Imagine having that much shame in your soul. It must make looking in the mirror a painful experience.

But no. I'm wrong. They've been raised differently to me and you Mike. They've been raised in a way you and I can't fully comprehend. Try as we might.

These poor souls and their gormless supporters, fear gray. To them, it's either black or it's white. You're either with them. Or against them.

The comments you'll get will probably bear this out.

[Ron Poore]

Reagan’s secretary of energy was Watt, press secretary Speaks. My podiatrist is Dr. Footer, my veterinarian is Dr. Katz.

[David Dyer-Bennet]

The first one I remember people mocking was the "war on poverty". And that's something that can, in principle, perhaps even be defeated.

Then there was the "war on drugs", which I called the "war on some drugs" (since alcohol and tobacco seemed not to be on their list). Drugs kicked our ass, as a friend who participated in some of the Central American aspects of that war said; but then, repression is never the answer.

Here's the Google Ngrams chart for those two plus the one you mentioned:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=war+on+drugs%2Cwar+on+poverty%2Cwar+on+terror&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cwar%20on%20drugs%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwar%20on%20poverty%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cwar%20on%20terror%3B%2Cc0

[Crabby Umbo]

Hey, I thought I was the only guy that used the term: "Bush the Lesser"!

[Patrick Medd]

In British English it may be of note that ‘Trump’ is another word for fart.

[Steve H.]

'The verb "to trump," of course, means "to override," as when a card of a different suit overrides the suit that was led.'

Over here it's also a (childish) euphemism for 'to break wind'.

[Benjamin Marks]

Second comment: For years here in Vermont the Chair of the Public Service Board, which oversees electric utilities, was Jim Volz.

[Manuel Jung]

And now the fight against a virus.. Bet it will stay a while? The underlying universal law beeing: where you focus, energy flows and connects and creates. Wouldn't it be thereforde much wiser to engage a campaign for good health by plant based food (for example)?

[Patrick Dodds]

Wake and Payne are a funeral directors near here. I work with a physio called Hipwell. Nominative determinism is always good for a wry smile.

[Ken]

"It's snowing and below freezing here right now. Making me anxious about the health of the delicate blooming plants hereabouts."

That weather also can't be helpful to all the birds that recently hatched or fledged, or the insects they need to survive.

[Donald Johnson]

Let's not leave out my favorite: the inventor of the modern toilet was Thomas Crapper.

[

I think that one went the other way, though, right? He came first and then the word was derived from the name. I could be wrong. --Mike

]

[Phil K]

As mentioned earlier by Patrick Dodds, there is another (proper) term for it - Nominative Determinism. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_determinism

I may add more later but my personal favourite was of the short lived leader of a rather foul political party over here called UKIP, the rather aptly named - Richard Braine. He insisted it was Richard and not Dick but you can guess what stuck!