aptronyms (was: Johnny Mac(k) Brown)

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:00 AM -0700 9/6/04, Arnold M. Zwicky wrote:
>On Sep 6, 2004, at 5:01 AM, dInIs wrote:
>
>>Is there a summary somewhere of putative relative silly names (e.g.,
>>Ima Hogg's sister Ura)?...
>
>there's a series of books by John Train (published by Clarkson N.
>Potter): Remarkable Names of Real People, Most Remarkable Names, and
>Even More Remarkable Names.  i don't recall how much evidence Train had
>for the names he lists, though.
>
>arnold

By coincidence (or is it synchronicity?), over at Anu Garg's "A Word
A Day" site, there has been much recent discussion of these
"aptronyms", and I also find I preserved from 2002 a brief discussion
of these under the same name by Mike Quinion at World Wide Words, a
name that Mike's sources track back to FPA, Franklin P. Adams.  Mike
also mentioned a discussion in some issues of the New Scientist
magazine in the U.K. from the mid-1990s that cites Jung and Stekel.
As for those cute little party-type books of John Train, I remember
them fondly, but I recall wondering at the time whether he was a bit
too creative, as Arnold implies above.  They're not the kind of books
that suffer footnotes.

Larry