On the weekend in a golf tournament here in Australia, Stuart Appleby came from behind to beat two relatively unknown golfers, Adam Bland and Daniel Guant. A journalist writing about the tournament referred to the onomatopoeiac pair of "Gaunt" and "Bland". Quite clever, but obviously wrong. Is there a word that essentially means "by name and by nature"? I know "onomastic" refers to proper names but that is still not the word I'm looking for.
Regards, Mark.
One word for a name that describes its owner is "aptronym". I suppose you could say Gaunt and Bland were "aptronymic".
That's brilliant! Thanks.
Reminds me of a section in Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. He suggested a class of words that describe themselves, words like "brief", "ugly", "written", "polysyllabic", "mispelled", "verbal" and "français". Let's call this class of words (since you said so) "aptronymic".
Now let's consider the opposite class, words that are nothing like their referents, for example "spoken", "monosyllabic", "onomatopoeic", "anglais", "misspelled" and "oral". Let's call these words "anaptronymic".
Now (asks Hofstadter), let's consider: Is "anaptronymic" anaptronymic?
If it is—if "anaptronymic" is in some way the opposite of the words that are members of its class—then it is indeed anaptronymic...and it is therefore descriptive of itself ("anaptronymic" is anaptronymic) and thus aptronymic. Wait, if it's anaptronymic then it's aptronymic. But if it's aptronymic—if "anaptronymic" is aptronymic—then it's anaptronymic.
Hofstadter was fascinated by such contradictions, and he managed to make them interesting to me too.
Bob, you make me smile.