Perhaps some of you were less than ecstatic when you heard that Bob Diamond, the man who likes to kill a dull Sunday evening by coating himself in melted gold and rolling around in the £100 million (US$154 million) he keeps in his oak-lined bank vault while laughing richishly, is to become the chief executive of Barclays. It’s a pain for Diamond, of course, having to build another bank vault and all, but some other people have also found the thought of the man who even Peter “mate of Russian oligarchs” Mandelson once described as “the unacceptable face of banking,” who made a gigantic pile of money out of a sector of the banking industry that was at least partly to blame for the near-collapse of the financial system in 2008, being given a job as one of the top head honchos in Britain’s banking world a little, well, difficult to digest.
Foolish, pessimistic people! There is nothing but cheer to be derived from this appointment. Seriously, what could possibly be better than the chief executive of one of Britain’s biggest banks, a man who once received a bonus of £21 million, having the name of Diamond? I’ll tell you what: for Diamond’s former job as chief executive of Barclays Capital to now be partly filled by someone called Rich Ricci. I’m sorry, is this a news story or a tale by Dickens?
Some people teach themselves a foreign language. Others like to travel and learn about new cultures. My area of interest is nominative determinism. Nominative determinism is a term coined by the New Scientist, referring to when people’s names reflect, perhaps even determine, their job or their interests. Of course, in the New Scientist this refers to science-type people, such as a gentleman called Daniel Snowman who has written a book about polar regions. I, however, worship at a much, much broader church, one that spans the noble reaches from Amy Winehouse (it’s just pure luck she wasn’t called Amy Crackhouse) to Peter Stringfellow (a surname that reflects his favored look for women and, going by certain infamous holiday snaps, himself.) As Diamond amply proves, wealth is often reflected in the name of the person or business, perhaps because they’re so rich they buy their own names. Donald Trump could have only ever been a gold-plated, ego-ridden turnip, while Goldman Sachs would have been rejected by Dickens himself as too heavy handed. Paris Hilton always struck me as being named with especial aptness, being both expensive and tacky, with an off-putting sheen of grubbiness.
Then there are the names that dictate one’s chosen profession: Arsene Wenger’s name surely explains his inexplicable devotion to Arsenal, while the recently captured Jamaican drug lord Christopher Coke is absolutely my drug dealer du choix. Usain Bolt trains, I have no doubt, most diligently, but surely having a name like that is the nomenclature equivalent of injecting oneself with performance-enhancing drugs every day, since birth. At the other end of the scale, Christine Bleakley certainly lives up to her name in terms of the vision she provides of successful women in television. For a woman whose career began with a kiss and tell about a certain footballer and arguably ended when she masturbated a boar on a reality TV show, Rebecca Loos was most fortuitously named. Richard Littlejohn has a similarly expressive name. (I just mean that he possibly has a small bathroom in his house. What else could I have meant?) And finally, the best example of nominative determinism of them all: Bobbit, a name that works for both the action (as performed by wife Lorena) and the result (as demonstrated by husband John). Bob Diamond, welcome to this premier club.
Of course, the reason I am obsessed with other people’s names is because my own is so ridiculous. Ever since I was old enough to have friends who figured out that my name rhymes with many words, such as “badly,” “madly” and, yes, “sadly,” and particularly so in a singsong voice, I have hated my name. I hate that 70 percent of my post is addressed to Mr Hadley Freeman or, worse, Mr Hadley-Freeman; I hate that people often tell me that they expected me to be a man (“I am,” is, I have found, the most satisfying answer); and while I don’t mind the many, many mangled nicknames people make of my name, I can’t help but feel that “Haddles” is even worse than Hadley. I think my relationship with my name hit its low point when a gentleman I met at a party introduced me to his friends as “Morgan Stanley.” So shaming. Surely my name at least has the cachet to be confused with Goldman Sachs.
No, I am not named after Spandau Ballet, nor after a suburb of north London. I am named after Ernest Hemingway’s first (“And best!” my mother likes to insist, consolingly) wife. And now, someone has written a very lovely book about her, called The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain. While I can’t say it has given me a newfound love for my name, there is some consolation in reading about Hadley’s typical day, which tended to involve being adored by Hemingway, dining with Gertrude Stein and then drinking champagne with Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. And most importantly, no one ever, ever called her Haddles.
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