If I were born with the name Clyde Cessna, I might consider naming my airplane a Cessna.   Works a lot better than calling it a Clyde.  If I were named Walter Beech, I might choose a name such as “Beechcraft” for my wings.   William Boeing did fairly well naming an aircraft company after himself, as did Howard Hughes, James McDonnell and Donald Douglas, and a few others.

But if my name were Alan Klapmeier I might prefer to choose a name such as Cirrus for my airplane, which is what he did.  And if my name were Wolf Hoffmann, I might choose to call my airplane a Wolf.   Instead he was bold enough to call his company Hoffmann Flugzeugbau, but the aircraft he manufactured he called the Dimona.  To better suit North American tastes, he switched two letters and added one more, thus changing the name of his airplanes (and his company) to Diamond.   I guess he thought Americans liked Diamonds.  Perhaps he was right; I bought one, and so did a lot of other people.

My father was a salesman most of his life, and his territory covered the South.  There are a couple of different versions of the story, but the one I remember was that his boss said to him “the first thing you need to do is change your name, because no one will be able to remember it and no one will ever call you back.”   So he promptly traded his first name—Morton, for his last name, and contracted his last name to “Hal,” and never looked back.   My very first social security card, as a matter of fact, reads “Ira Morton.”

If I had ever doubted the veracity of my father’s story (which I did), all that disappeared when I became a graduate student in Murray, Kentucky.   I had changed my name back to its original “Heilveil,” but southern politeness prevented the undergraduates from referring to elders by their first name.   It was excruciating listening to them try to pronounce my last name, and I am convinced to this day that it is impossible to pronounce with a southern dialect.  As I listened to the students struggle, I kept begging them to “just call me Ira.”   But rather than appear disrespectful they preferred to courageously go down trying, ending up mangling the name altogether. Eventually I became known as “Doctor Hao….” which then trailed off into a mumble that sounded as if they were speaking a Chinese dialect of Hindi.

Now, it turns out, some researchers in the U.S. and Australia, publishing in the prestigious Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, have performed experiments in which people with more pronounceable last names, such as Sherman and Jenkins, were judged more positively than those with difficult-to-pronounce names, such as Farquharson and Leszczynska.    They could have easily have used “Heilveil” and come up with the same results.   They also found that people with simpler names were more likely to be voted into political office, and that lawyers with easier sounding nameswere promoted faster within law firms.

Part of the reason I switched my last name back to its original tongue-twister was because I had not only been made fun of as a child for my crazy last name (most of the kids called me “havalaval,” which for some reason they thought was funny), but I really took it on the chin when the name was changed to Morton.   Although changing ethnic-sounding names was a common practice back then, kids look for anything they can find to tease, and so my father was accused of being in the witness protection program, or trying to escape the reaches of the law, by changing it in the first place.   Stories about my dad being a salesman in the south didn’t fly.

Had my dad been alive for me to tell him the results of the recent research, he would have really appreciated it, although he seemed to wear his business name quite comfortably.  Or, more likely, upon hearing the advantages of having an easier to pronounce last name, he probablywould have smiled and said, “Tell me something I don’t already know!”

Perhaps, if I were ever to invent my own airplane (who knows?), I might just call it a Morton.   Not too shabby, eh?