Nominative determinism is, as essayist Mark Dery explains, "the (purely hypothetical) tendency to pursue a calling or, more broadly, embody an attribute implied by your name." For instance, my daughter's orthodontist was Dr. Toth. Another example: author Bee Wilson wrote a book called The Hive: The Story of the Honeybee and Us. You probably have examples of your own.
For his latest Medium column, Dery dipped his pen into a fresh inkwell of aqua regia to write a hilariously caustic piece on the meaning of the word "trump" and why it's a perfect fit for Trump and his fraudulent spawn.
The Online Etymology Dictionary traces the word back to the Old French tromper ("to deceive"), in or around the 14th century, and from there to se tromper de, "'to mock,' from Old French tromper, 'to blow a trumpet.'" The Dictionary notes,
Brachet explains this as "to play the horn, alluding to quacks and mountebanks who attracted the public by blowing a horn and then cheated them into buying …." The Hindley Old French dictionary has baillier la trompe ("blow the trumpet") as "act the fool"…
Has there ever been a more on-the-nose description of The Donald, a braying, bumptious mountebank who built his real-estate empire on tax evasion, bilking banks, and greasing the palms of corrupt pols, with more than a little help from the tabloids and entertainment TV, then bragged about his chicanery in The Art of the Deal; a smirking, self-satisfied ignoramus and serial fabricator who conned millions into electing him president, then duped them into swallowing the patently preposterous Big Lie that he'd been cheated out of a second term, then turned around and swindled those same sapheads, it now appears, out of more than $250 million in donations to fund dead-on-arrival legal challenges to Biden's victory? (Adding insult to idiocy, a good bit of that money was diverted, it turns out, to worthy causes such as Kimberly Guilfoyle's $60,000 fee for introducing her fiancé, Donald Trump Jr., at the January 6 "Stop the Steal" rally that lit the insurrection's fuse. Not bad for less than three minutes' work.)
