NOMEN EST OMEN — Naming Is Destiny

Tacoma Vibrations

(Filed by Anna Graham, Language Arts & Word Games correspondent)

Paul Dickson preserves a lovely fragment of 1920s name-craft in the book, What’s in a Name?

Namely, a “name psychologist” who claimed she could divine character and even geography by analyzing the numbers and individual letters in a name. Her verdict? Spokane pulsed with “optimistic vibrations,” while Tacoma — based solely on its letters and their numerological score — suffered from “terrible vibrations, a depressing place.”

It was the sort of faddish letter-magic meant to entertain the credulous—until fate delivered its punchline.

Because in 1940, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge actually collapsed from vibration —the deck twisting like a distressed anagram, and the whole structure unspelling itself straight into Puget Sound. We remain surprised that Paul Dickson didn’t notice this occurrence.

No mysticism was required. Only the sly pleasure of seeing language and physics brush past each other like two strangers sharing a private joke.

In the grand crossword of the cosmos, Tacoma seems to have circled its own clue a bit too accurately.

Aeroelastic flutter — a self-exciting, wind-driven form of structural vibration — is what caused the Tacoma Narrows Bridge to fail.

MORE: Nomen est omen.