Aptronym

When is a word a word?  A real, defined-in-the-dictionaries word, I mean, as opposed to someone’s ingenious coinage which gets itself on the Internet and spreads virally.  The question comes up in relation to “aptronym,” one of the rare words not to appear in the OED (see also Apostille) or in the many other print dictionaries I have consulted, either spelled thus or in the alternate form “aptonym.”  As far as I can tell “aptronym” is exclusively an online word—Google it, and you will find many citations—and it means a name which seems “aptly suited to its owner,” often in a humorous way.   Wikipedia gives dozens of examples from fiction and purportedly from real life, e.g., Russell Brain the neurologist, Brian Cashman the general manager of the grossly overpaid New York Yankees, and so on.  Apparent aptronyms can be deceiving, of course. When I was in college, the imminent arrival of a female freshman named Loveday became a matter of considerable excitement among my classmates.  She turned out to be a studious and serious person, eventually a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in mathematics, and is now a research scientist and professor.  (“Loveday” is a very old English name, incidentally, and one originally given to boys as well as girls.)

Perhaps the OED will catch up with “aptronym” in time.  While waiting, I am willing to trust the authority of the much-published and erudite linguist David Crystal, who uses the word and clearly accepts it as a term of art. In any case we needaptronym” as a convenient term for an important literary phenomenon, the naming of a character in such a way as to bring out his or her salient qualities.  Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature is particularly rich in memorable, often obvious, aptronymic characters.  There is Joseph Surface, the plausible hypocrite in Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, and Lady Wishfort, the sex-hungry grande dame of Congreve’s The Way of the World.  Subtler examples come later, from Dickens for example, who was brilliant at inventing names that hover at the edges of symbolic appropriateness: Steerforth, in David Copperfield; Edmund Sparkler, in Little Dorrit; Sir Leicester Dedlock, in Bleak House; Bella Wilfer, the beautiful but headstrong heroine of Our Mutual Friend.

What is the best real-life aptronym?  Here I might go with the Lumière brothers, co-inventors (in 1895) of motion pictures.  In French, lumière means “light.”  And for a fictional aptronym, I would pick the name of a minor character in Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part 2. She is both a termagant (“Away, you cut-purse rascal! you filthy bung, away!”) and a lachrymose sentimentalist (“By my troth, thou’t set me a-weeping, an thou say’st so”), sometimes at close to the same moment.  Her name is Doll Tearsheet, and if you give “Tear” both of its possible pronunciations you will understand the full extent of the playwright’s cleverness.