Awesome names

There was a post the other day in TierneyLab, a blog of the nytimes, about the "Boy named Sue" theory: the idea that people with bad names turn out just fine, or even better off because of their bad name. [The winner of TierneyLab's bad names contest was a woman named Iona Knipl ("really? I have two!"), but this is besides the point.] In the comments section, someone posted about an OB/GYN in Fairfax, VA whose name is (and I'm not making this up, I did some googling): Harry Beaver. I mean, if that's your name, is there any profession other than obstetrics and gynecology that you could really go into?? And it made me remember reading something a while back about how people really do tend to go into professions suggested by their names, and it's actually been studied as something more than anecdotal evidence. There is a dentist in Salem named Dr. Fang, and dentists in Needham (they're in practice together) named Drs. Needleman and Yelland. Though a friend reminds me of the OB/GYN at UMass named Harrison Ball (he doesn't go by Harrison...and yet why not??) who maybe reacted against his name in choosing a specialty. In an awesome-sounding book called Bertha Venation: And Hundreds of Other Funny Names of Real People, Larry Ashmead talks about people like the environmental engineer Hugh Fish, and what happens when Ms. Gay marries Mr. Beech. (I heard about this book on NPR.) And there's some debate as to what comes first: is your name your destiny? According to the New York Times (really, where I get most of my information), people who study names (called onomastics), call it "nominitive determinism" when Dr. Fang grows up to be a dentist or Dr. Fish becomes an ichthyologist. Ashmead also wrote a chapter on funny names that arise when people marry each other, like Ms. Coffee marrying Mr. Bean, or Ms. Gay marrying Mr. Beech (she hyphenated it to Gay-Beech, according to the book, and didn't actually find it all that amusing). Luckily, Dr. Beaver's children say that they got many laughs out of their father's name (according to their posts on Dave Barry's blog, and he never makes stuff up). :)