Things to Have Named After You: An Incomplete Ranking

Lately, I've been thinking about what it means to have a legacy. What will people remember you for when you're gone? What meaning does your name carry?

Don't worry; I'm not getting into my feelings today. It's too early in the day, week and year for that. No, today I simply want to consider this:

What's a good thing to have named after you?

Let's review; we'll go from worst to best.

THE MOSTLY BAD THINGS

A medical malady

I do not wish to start out this hopefully-lighthearted ranking by appearing to make fun of any real-world affliction, so I will instead offer a hypothetical.

Let's say that at some point it is discovered that there is a trace mineral in the spices that give Cincinnati Chili its signature flavor, and that there are certain people with a rare genetic predisposition for whom this trace mineral causes them to turn blue. Were this confluence of hypotheticals to occur, there is a small but real chance that doctors, upon diagnosing the malady in a single patient and locating its causes, would dub it "Scott Hines's Suffering".

I would not be terribly thrilled about that.

A law (actual, legal)

I must make a similar caveat with the second stop on my ranking.

(Don't worry; these get progressively less bleak.)

Needless to say, it's usually not great if a law is named after you, especially if you are not a legislator yourself. It either means that the law was created in reaction to something bad you did, or more likely because of something bad that happened to you. Carrying through our hypothetical from the first stop, we might then presume that the new regulation banning colloidal silver in Cincinnati Chili would be named "Scott's Law".

I would be mildly happy to find out that we were once again living in a country where food safety regulations were considerable viable, but I would still not be pleased with the overall situation, on balance. In fact, I'd be rather blue.

A folly

It takes a big mistake for something to be dubbed a "folly". There's a certain level of grandeur to it that exceeds your mere boo-boos, oopsies, my-bads or cock-ups. You've got to do something really out there for people to call it a folly and to name it after you–something like buying a half-million square miles of barren, icy land from the Russians. That said, it turns out Alaska was a pretty good purchase and William H. Seward was vindicated by history.

I don't want to be vindicated by history, though. I want to be vindicated now.

A boner

Like the previous example, this one is pretty much about one guy.

Fred Merkle was a decent ballplayer. He put in sixteen seasons in Major League Baseball, collecting over 1,500 hits with a perfectly-respectable career OPS+ of 109 and 19.8 fWAR.

Of course, those two latter statistics were developed decades after he died, and he was remembered then as he is now primarily for a (frankly, understandable) baserunning gaffe in a late-season game between the New York Giants and Chicago Cubs in his rookie season of 1908, one that would help deliver the Cubs the pennant over Merkle's Giants. That play would be immortalized as "Merkle's Boner", a phrase I am now using one hundred and sixteen years after it happened.

I suppose there's something to be said for the fact that Fred Merkle lives on in the collective memory of baseball fans in a way that many of his contemporaries do not, but I don't know if he'd be happy to know that we still call it that, especially if he knew what else that word means now.

A mountain

Listen, it sounds nice to have a mountain named after you, but all of the mountains already have names. The only way to name a mountain now is through colonialism, and that was also the case when many mountains received their current "official" names.

They've been around a while! You're too late!

A mountain pass

The good news is that there's a chance you can get a mountain pass named after you without simply graffitiing over a native name, but the bad news is that you're probably going to have to die there for it to happen.

THE MIXED BAGS

A surgical procedure

Here's the bright side: if you get an experimental new surgical procedure named after you, that means that it worked. If it didn't work, people simply would not talk about it. Unless it really didn't work, I guess, in which case they'd probably name it after the doctor and call it "[Doctor]'s Folly" or "[Doctor]'s Boner".

The downside is that you had to have something wrong with you that there was not previously a fix for.

The obvious best-case scenario here is Tommy John Surgery, more technically known as Ulnar Collateral Ligament reconstruction, a procedure developed in 1974 by Dr. Frank Jobe that saved the career of its eponym, longtime major league pitcher Tommy John, along with those of countless players in the decades since.

The drawback for you and me is that neither of us are good major league pitchers currently, and such a surgery would do nothing to change that. The best we can hope for is that Scott Hines Surgery can make me less blue.

You know, from the chili thing.

A town

This just isn't that easy anymore. At one point, you could just show up somewhere, slap together a one-room post office and name the place "Scottsburg".

You do that now, and you're liable to have a Netflix documentary made about you.

(Also, there's a couple Scottsburgs already.)

A stadium

It's supposedly an honor, and there's a few places where the name has stood the test of time. Wrigley Field. Fenway Park. Lambeau Field. James Gamble Nippert Stadium. These days, though, it's bound to last you twenty years, tops, before they tear down the stadium named after you and/or rebrand it as something like "Scott Hines Court at Palantir Fieldhouse".

At that point, the fans are just gonna end up calling it by a nickname, like "The Blue Guy's House".

A comet

It's majestic. It's mysterious. It carries across the centuries. Even if you don't know who Edmond Halley was, you know about his comet.

Two major drawbacks, though:

1. You have to know enough about science to identify the comet before anyone else, which was hard in Halley's time and might be harder now
2. There's a chance it ends up being an asteroid that's headed straight for Earth and now people are probably going to be super mad at you for it, even though it's not your fault, you just discovered it. Heck, if anything they should be grateful that you gave them time to prepare but noooo they're just throwing trash at you and calling you "that Smurf bastard"

It's a mixed bag, is what I'm saying.

A college dormitory

It's always meant as an honor when it happens, but to paraphrase Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach's 1998 song "Toledo", do they know their name doesn't travel very well?

I'll give an example. When I was a freshman in college at Cincinnati, two of my best friends from high school attended Ohio State and lived in Haverfield House. I spent a good deal of time hanging out there on weekends back home in Columbus; I have many fond memories there. I just looked it up, and the dorm was named in 1942 after James W. Haverfield, an OSU graduate and Navy veteran who was killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor the previous year. A nice honor for an unquestionably-worthy recipient.

This information is at odds with my primary lingering association of the name, though, which is that a group of our female friends referred to themselves (positively) as "The Havvy Hoes".

I can't speak for James Haverfield. It's entirely possible he'd have been honored by that. Maybe not. Either way, he wasn't around to see it.

Mixed bag, again. Moving on.

MOSTLY GOOD, BUT WITH CAVEATS

Another person

It is an honor to have another person named after you. In fact, I can't conjure up a scenario where such naming is done out of anything but the highest respect. When my son was born, we gave my father and grandfather's first name to him as a middle name. Out of respect.

It was only when he was four or five that my mother pointed out "you know, you only use that name when you're mad at him".

A theorem

PRO: Extremely long-lasting. Pythagoras died 2,500 years ago and we still talk about his work on triangles. Proper legend.

CON: Most of the easy stuff like triangles has already been figured out. You gotta work really hard to pull off a theorem these days and–let's be real–I wouldn't have figured out that triangle business on my own if he hadn't, either.

A law (folksy)

We've already covered real laws, but what about ones that are just folk widsom, like Murphy's Law? I bet I could come up with one of those.

"If you eat enough chili, something interesting's bound to happen!"

I dunno. I'll keep working on it.

A cube

Honestly, that was probably a one-time deal. I'm not sure how else you'd get a type of cube named after you these days, but shout out to Ernő Rubik. He nailed this one.

ACTUALLY GOOD

A bird

You would think there aren't any new birds out there, just like there aren't any new mountains or cubes out there, but every once in a while someone still discovers a new one, and then they get to name it. It's not even problematic to name them after a person the way it is to call Denali "Mount McKinley". Have you seen what some birds are called? Heck, if I were a bird, I'd much rather be called a "Scott's Jay" than a Dickcissel, Hoary Puffleg or Tinkling Cisticola.

You don't even need expertise for this one like you do with the theorems and whatnot. You've just got to be friends with an ornithologist like the namesake of the Cooper's Hawk was.

Are any of you ornithologists? Let's be friends. We can go out for chili.

A library

Andrew Carnegie was in his mid-60s before he devoted himself to philanthropy. There's still time for our modern robber barons to realize that people will remember your name a lot more fondly if you put up a library instead of dicking around trying to go to Mars.

A sandwich

When it all comes down to it, there isn't anything better to have your name slapped on than a sandwich.

To have this honor bestowed on you, you have to have a certain level of renown, at least at the local level. Moreover, you have to be well-liked–so much so that people are going to be happy to say your name when partaking in one of the best activities known to mankind (ordering a deli sandwich).

Meanwhile, the downsides are minimal. You don't have to die. You don't have to have surgery. You don't need to know math, and the sandwich isn't going to poop all over people's cars like the Scott's Jay does.

(Sorry about that. The chili upsets their bird stomachs.)

If you're going to name something after me? Make it a sandwich.

–Scott Hines (@actioncookbook)

Did I miss something? Sound off in the comments! What would you want named after you?