We've all got one ­ in

fact, most of us have two or three. More than that and you need hyphens

to hold them together.

Names are here to stay. When

a village got too many "Johns" to keep them straight, folks

individualized them by physical characteristics or occupation or paternity.

John the Short. John the Weaver. John, Richard's son.

Monarchs with a dozen baptismal

names are remembered by a single telling descriptive: Ivan the Terrible.

Katharine the Great. Today? George the Bemused and Richard the Undisclosed?

I collect names, torn from

obits or jotted on envelopes that invariably get discarded. Some engage

me for no reason I can explain ­ like the name of the genial-appearing

Gander, Newfoundland, policeman in the AJC last week. His name is Ozzy

Fudge . That makes me laugh as much now as when I first saw it under

his picture.

My parents spoke of a woman

they knew named Augusta Gale . I knew a Sandy Pyle in college,

and recently noticed the wistful name of Sherwood B. Fein .

Spell-check works its own distorted

humor on proper names, substituting " Ohm meter " for the

name of our late friend Bill Ohmsieder . Our son-in-law, Brian Withnel l,

was " withheld ." Full disclosure requires me to report

that when I write Satterthwaite , spell-check thinks I probably

mean " scatterbrain ."

There is a name for the names

that tickle me the most, although as a coined word, its correct spelling

is in doubt. "Aptonym" or "aptronym"? Neither got

into my Webster's or my American Heritage, so pick one.

An aptonym is a name that is

peculiarly suited to its owner because of his or her occupation or some

other characteristic. An apt name, as it were.

My personal favorite through

the years has been the honest-to-goodness name of the Dean at Gettysburg

College in the mid-1950s : Seymour B. Dunn .

Apt aptonyms have the most

fun with the professions. I read of a swimmer who went from gold fillings

to Olympic gold. Mark Spitz had planned to be a dentist.

My husband Dave had a dentist

named Stonebreaker when he was a kid, but a Dr. Comfort

has been drilling in Haddonfield, N.J., for 25 years that we know of.

Used to be a Washington, D.C. orthodontist named Brace , too.

Were they victims of nominative

count, but I never expected to see an odd name like my own ­ until

I did a vanity search on the Internet one day.

A woman with my name ­

my exact, archaically spelled name ­ is a technical writer in Concord,

Mass. It was like finding a missing twin I didn't know I had.

We corresponded briefly, sharing

astonishment, and I was oddly pleased to discover that I'd owned the name

considerably longer than she had. If anyone ever questions my authenticity,

I can cite seniority.

When she didn't answer a note,

I concluded that the improbable collision of our lives was over. Months

went by, and then came a morning when I checked e-mail to find emblazoned

across the top of one message: " Sallie Boring Satterthwaite ."

"Huh!" I thought.

"Somebody didn't like a column." Then I read the note: "Remember

me? Changed e-mail accounts and just found your address again."

Boring was my shadow's maiden

name.

Some aptonym sources: www.wordsmith.org/awad/awadmail63.html

and www.m-w.com/lighter/name/aptronym.htm .

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