You know, aptronyms…like when a gynecologist is named Seymour Bush

To his list, from our small rural area, I can probably add 20 Farmers who, ta da, farm or, at least, grew up on one.

Is there another term for made-up pairings (like book titles and authors)? Examples: 1) 'Redundant Systems' by Justin Case and 2) 'Forty-eight Yards to the Outhouse' by Willie Makeit, illustrated by Betty Dont.

Emmett

Grant – I'm surprised at you! Aptronyms are an awful lot like puns, you know!
(My Dad used to say, “Puns are the lowest form of wit. Or, for some people, wit-out!”)

This kind of book title / author pun pairing has a name. It's published in the “think&grin” jokes pages in Boys' Life magazine, published by the Boy Scouts of America for nearly a century. It's one of the five standard joke types used in think&grin – 14 occurrences this month alone, and is known as “A book never written”. I'd guess it goes back at least to the mid-twentieth century.

Examples from the Dec. '08 edition:
A book never written: “A Scout Is Thrifty” by Xavier Allowance.
A book never written: “Building Snowmen” by I.C. Fingers.
A book never written: “None Taken” by Noah Fence.

The other standard think&grin joke types are Tom Swifties, Daffynitions, the Warped Wiseman, and the three-liners. Examples of all of these types can be seen at boyslife.org.

(Boys receive a patch and a new Handbook or Fieldbook when their joke is published.)

Finally, while writing this, my son (on the adjacent computer) was playing Halo online, and there's another related category of pun names – the character name chosen in online games. In Halo, the payoff is when you kill another player, and it says: “You were killed by _____.” Popular names are A Vehicle (matches the message you get when you are run over by an unoccupied vehicle), Yo Mama (always popular), an Internet Glitch, a Random Event, etc.

Bill, that's exactly where I first caught on to them. I remember one titled "The Outhouse" by Willy Makeit and Betty Dont. 🙂

Grant Barrett said:

You know, aptronyms… like when a gynecologist is named Seymour Bush. A column about names accidentally befitting the named.

But an even better one, I thought, was the Hungarian gynecologist Dr. Zoltan Ovary (Óváry being a Hungarian name meaning "of the old castle" or from the town called Óvár - old castle). This from an issue of Reader's Digest some time in the 1970s. Also the CEO of the largest Dutch bank (till it was nationalised in the recent financial crisis), ABN Amro, is Rijkman (Dutch for "rich man") Groenink. And in Kingston, Ontario, there was (perhaps still is) a law firm called B. Lawless.

Monica Sandor