Tinfoil Hat

Juliet:
“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.”

In Act II, Scene II of playwright William Shakespeare’s lyrical tale of “star-cross’d” lovers, Romeo Montague and Juliet Capulet “are doomed from the start as members of two warring families,” explains the eNotes.com website:

Here Juliet tells Romeo that a name is an artificial and meaningless convention, and that she loves the person who is called “Montague”, not the Montague name and not the Montague family. Romeo, out of his passion for Juliet, rejects his family name and vows, as Juliet asks, to “deny (his) father” and instead be “new baptized” as Juliet’s lover. This one short line encapsulates the central struggle and tragedy of the play.¹

“Does your name play a role in determining what career you choose or how successful you are within your chosen profession?” asks Steve Tobak of CBS News. “There’s certainly a ton of anecdotal evidence that names and career choices are related and additional evidence that people don’t necessarily choose doctors, lawyers, and who knows what else, completely at random from a list.” ²

Rachel Emma Silverman and Joe Light write in The Wall Street Journal:

In a controversial, widely cited 2002 paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers from the State University of New York at Buffalo found that people were more likely to choose professions with names that are similar to their own first names. Another study, out of Wayne State University, Detroit, found that medical doctors and lawyers were more likely to have last names that somehow evoked their professions. It was published [in 2010] in the journal “Names: A Journal of Onomastics.” ³

The CBS News article continues:

Not surprisingly, there are dissenting views in academia. Frank Nuessel, professor of languages and linguistics at the University of Louisville, who edits [the Names journal] and coined the term “aptonym” — when your name reflects your profession — says he doesn’t really believe in “nominal determinism.” ⁴

The Wall Street Journal quotes Professor Nuessel: “I really don’t believe in nominal determinism. Probably most of these tend to be accidental.” ⁵

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But Jozef M. Nuttin, Jr., in 1987 “showed that individuals tend to like both their names and initials, called the name-letter effect,” notes Psychlopedia. “In particular, they appear to like their initials more than other letters of the alphabet.” ⁶

According to Wikipedia, “The name