How not to get your name stolen

So I’m currently reading a captivating piece of academic literature: Seinfeld and Philosophy: A Book about Everything and Nothing (William Irwin, Open Court, 2000). As much as I would love to describe some of the thoughts contained therein – the book contains various essays by philosophers, along the lines of “Making Something out of Nothing: Seinfeld, Sophistry, and the Tao” and “George’s Failed Quest for Happiness: An Aristotelian Analysis” – it’s really one page that concerns me for this post. I was reading Mark Conrad’s contribution, “Plato or Nietzsche: Time, Essence, and Eternal Recurrence in Seinfeld,” when I spotted this, in an explanation of how humor is different from normal conversation:

If I say, “Mary is bright, and she’s pretty,” I am saying the same thing as “Mary is pretty, and she’s bright.” If I have omitted saying who Mary is, which Mary I am referring to, I can always go back and tack on that information. “I mean Mary Stevens.” “Oh, that Mary!” you reply. The situation has been fixed; the confusion evaporates.

Try fixing a joke after you’ve already told it poorly. It’s easier to sum up Nietzsche’s philosophy in 25 words or less.

I’ve emphasized the name “Mary Stevens” because it happens that I went to high school with a girl named Mary Stevens, and so of course I had to share with her how philosopher Mark Conrad thinks she’s pretty and bright. Then, however, I got to thinking about what I am going to call “stolen names.”

How much would it suck to have your name snatched up by popular culture? It’s one thing if your name is “Bill Smith” or (forgive me) “Mary Stevens.” These are fairly generic, and liable to be used as decoy names in Math textbook word problems and essays about Seinfeld. You would never avoid naming your child “Mary” just because there’s a chance that some academic may use it in illustrating a hypothetical situation.

It’s another thing altogether be unfortunate enough to be christened with a name such as, say, “Harry Potter,” and have that name be appropriated by a children’s book author and paraded around on advertisements and movie posters for a decade or more. To wit, consider the probability of a boy being born in Great Britain in about 1990, with black hair, green eyes, poor eyesight, and named Harry Potter. The chances aren’t bad! And what’s the result? Years of teasing, resulting in an identity crisis, which can only lead to something terrible, like Capgras delusion.

I mean, look at this. I wanted to find some examples of the real-life Harry Potters out there on the Internet who were robbed of their individualities, so you could look into their sad, defeated eyes. I did a Google search for “Harry Potter,” but excluding the terms “book”, “movie”, “Rowling,” “wizard,” “Order of the Phoenix,” “owl,” “Prisoner of Azkaban,” and “Emma Watson.” After all that, still no non-Harry Potter results! There are people out there, normal people named Harry Potter, and they deserve to be found on Google!

If I were a famous author, I would make sure to name significant characters after people I despise, thereby robbing my enemies of their unique personalities forever.

The only solution for this problem is for all authors to name their characters as obscurely as possible. Examples can be found here. Take note of these real personal names; this is how to do it right: Urhines Kendall Icy Eight Special K (born in Kansas in 2003), Yahoo (a Mexican boy born in 2007, and named after where his parents met), and Depressed Cupboard Cheesecake (born in Kent, England, before 1988; no word on the sex of that child).