It's a little off topic, but, your post reminded me of two interesting items from the world of literary titbits.
I shall write a book some day about the appropriateness of names. Geoffrey Chaucer has a ribald ring, as is proper and correct, and Alexander Pope was inevitably Alexander Pope. Colley Cibber was a silly little man without much elegance and Shelley was very Percy and very Byshee.
—James Joyce, quoted in Voices: A Memoir, 'At Sylvia's' by Frederic Prokosch. Joyce was replying to a question from the young author and poet Prokosch "What do you think of Virginia Woolf?" Joyce answered that it was "an impressive name... she married her wolfish husband purely in order to change her name. Virginia Stephens is not a name for an exploratory authoress.
We find ourselves in something of a quandary when it comes to making up our minds about the phenomenon which Stekel calls, "the compulsion of the name". What he means by this is the sometimes quite grotesque coincidence between a man's name and his peculiarities or profession. For instance, Her Gross (Mr Grand) suffers from delusions of grandeur, Herr Kleiner (Mr Small) has an inferiority complex. The Altman sisters marry men twenty years older than themselves. Herr Feist (Mr Stout) is the Food Minister, Herr Rosstauscher (Mr Horsetrader) is a lawyer, Herr Kalberer (Mr Calver) is an obstetrician, Herr Freud (Joy) champions the pleasure-principle, Herr Adler (eagle) the will-to-power, Herr Jung (young) the idea of rebirth, and so on. Are these whimsicalities of chance, or the suggestive effects of a name, as Stekel seems to suggest, or are they meaningful coincidences?
—Carl Jung, Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principal
