Doppelganger names

We often think of personal names as specific to an individual, and sometimes they are. Yet often they are not. After all, the same individual may go by more than one name. Consider secret identities, for example. Superman is also Clark Kent (and Kal-El, his Kryptonian birthname), Wonder Woman is also Diana Prince (and Princess Diana of Paradise Island), and so on. Pen names and stage names are the literary equivalent of superhero secret identities: Samuel Clements becomes Mark Twain, Mary Ann Evans becomes George Eliot, Eric Arthur Blair becomes George Orwell, Marguerite Annie Johnson becomes Maya Angelou, Daniel Handler becomes Lemony Snicket, and Belcalis Almánzar becomes Cardi B. If someone is referred to by their less familiar name, we may not understand who is being mentioned. And, less famously, an individual’s name may have more than one variant, depending on the use of initials, diminutives, marital surnames, or gender transitioning. And in the legal system, there are any number of anonymized or unknown John Does and Jane Does (as well as Richard Roes, Jane Roes, and Mary Moes).

The opposite situation can easily arise as well, and here is where we find doppelganger names. Sometimes different people have the same name or similar ones, creating potential confusion. There are, after all, two Saint Augustines (one the 4^th century bishop of Hippo, the other the 6^th century monk who became Archbishop of Canterbury), two presidents named George Bush, two William Pitts (the Elder and the Younger), two Oliver Wendell Holmeses (one a physician-poet and one a Supreme Court Justice), two Hank Williamses, and two Frankensteins (the doctor and the monster), among many others. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, there is a pair of Cinnas, and the poet Cinna is fatally mistaken for Cinna the conspirator.

Doppelganger names have real-world consequences in today’s surveillance-minded world. After the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the U.S. federal government instituted something called the No-Fly List, which was a list of people prohibited from boarding commercial aircrafts in or into United States. The No-Fly List and similar watch lists are controversial, and one of the points of controversy has to do with so-called false positives. These arise when a prohibited individual or an individual flagged for additional screening has the same name as an unlucky innocent traveler. The late Massachusetts Senator Edward M. (Ted) Kennedy ran into this situation when the name “T Kennedy” appeared on the list. Kennedy was told that the name “T Kennedy” had once been used as the alias of a person on a screening list. The vagueness of the listed “T Kennedy” subjected the well-known politician to repeated travel delays.

The practice of naming boats and ships also sometimes results in different vessels having doppelganger names. A pair of such ships named Peerless was involved in a famous misunderstanding routinely taught in law schools: the 1864 case involved a lawsuit brought by a man named William Raffles against Daniel Wichelhaus and Gustav Busch. Wichelhaus and Busch had made a contract for cotton arriving from Mumbai (then called Bombay) on a ship named Peerless. It turned out that there were two ships called Peerless—and both were travelling from Mumbai to Liverpool, but at different times.

Wichelhaus and Busch said the Peerless intended in the contract was the ship that had set off in October, but their shipment of cotton arrived later on the other Peerless, which had left Mumbai in December. Wichelhaus and Busch refused to pay for the delivery, so William Raffles sued, arguing that the cotton had arrived on the Peerless as the contract stated. However, the English Court of Exchequer declined to enforce the agreement because the reference to a ship called Peerless was ambiguous.

The Raffles case might seem like a unique misunderstanding—a historical oddity—but it was followed by (and cited in) an 1869 Massachusetts case, Kyle v. Kavanagh. This time the dispute was about the sale of property “on Prospect Street” in Waltham, Massachusetts. However, there were two Prospect Streets in the town. The court’s instructions to the jury explained that: “[I]f the defendant was negotiating for one thing and the plaintiff was selling another thing, and if their minds did not agree as to the subject matter of the sale,” they could not be said to have made a contract.

Sometimes a rose is not just a rose.

_{Featured image: Philippe Awouters via Unsplash.}