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Now that our long national national nightmare of Weinerhood is over, I have to ask what's in a name?
If you have the name Weiner, it didn't help that your scandal was about your weiner. If your name was, say, Jones, strike that, Smith, you might not have been in the same amount of trouble.
I've had issues with my own name, Ira, one of the few names in English that ends with the feminine "a." You can't find any heroes in history or literature named Ira. Ethan Allen's brother, Ira, was also a leader of the Green Mountain Boys, but whose name went on the furniture store to evoke early American style? Not an Ira, who was also the go-to target of jokes in Mel (who wants to be Melvin?) Lazarus' comic strip Miss Peach. The strip was popular enough to last forty-five years, dogging my trail from childhood until the beginning of my dotage.
At least my name is not the name of a male anatomical part. I personally don't understand why a parent would call a son, Richard. I mean, how many Richards say, "Call me Dick"?
Females are not immune from this kind of tomfoolery. In my heavily Italian community there is a fairly common surname, Begina, which rhymes with the obvious. A little bit of research turned over a rock under which "begina" is the slang for when you push your belly fat together to make it look like a vagina.
Even the innocently named can be the butt (oops, Tom Butt's a politician in Richmond, CA, and Pamela Butt's a porn star in Brazil)--the object of jokes. My friend June told me that she walked the halls of high school with "June is busting out all over" trailing behind.
And it's not just a matter of teasing and double entendres. There's some real science about the power of a popular name and the problems of an unfortunate one.
Label a picture Jennifer and, whoever it is, people will rate her more attractive than if you call her Olga.
Put Michael as your name on a school exam, and you will get a better grade than if you're Boris.
You Jennifers and Michaels will also get better jobs and more talented lovers.
Freud says anatomy is destiny, but he could have said it about names. It's not an accident that there's a tennis player, Anna Smashinova, or that Howard Bragman is a PR guy in LA.
If you're a George, you're more likely to live in Georgia than your cousin, Louie, who's in St. Louis.
Even alliteration works. Sally, not Molly, sells seashells by the seashore, and my wife, Linda, is a lawyer. Check for yourself how many dentists are named Dennis.
Juliet was even wrong about the rose itself. Label an unidentified odor, "rose,"--even if it's garbage--and it gets more favorable sniff ratings than when you call it stinkweed.
And I think that was Shakespeare's point. He didn't agree with the naive 14-year-old star-crossed lover about the rose by another name smelling as sweet. I read the play as a refutation of one of the bard's most famous sayings. How else to explain the piling up of bodies who died because they had the wrong name?
But Boris and Olga don't despair. If I were recruiting for a job, I'd hire either of you ahead of Michael or Jennifer, knowing that with your unhappy name you had to-just as women doctors-work twice as hard to get half as far, which might, in part, explain Weiner's rise-so to speak-before his fall.
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My book, Nasty, Brutish, and Long: Adventures In Eldercare (Avery/Penguin, 2009), was a Finalist for the 2010 Connecticut Book Award. Click here to read the first chapter It provides a unique, insider's perspective on aging in America. It is an account of my work as a psychologist in nursing homes, the story of caregiving to my frail, elderly parents--all to the accompaniment of ruminations on my own mortality. Thomas Lynch, author of The Undertaking, calls it "A book for policy makers, caregivers, the halt and lame, the upright and unemcumbered: anyone who ever intends to get old."
