Amateur Gasbag Blooding

Via Graham Harman, I discovered the “best name anagram” generator, which does exactly what it sounds like. For example,

Graham Harman’s anagram name is HA HA! GRR! MAN AM

You may have seen it too, since the site makes it easy to post one’s name anagram on Facebook, so anagrams have been making the rounds.

For me, the generator suggests “ON AS BIGOT,” an unfortunate title indeed. I feel it necessary to point out that another valid anagram of my name is “GOT NO BIAS,” which has rather the opposite meaning.

My own discomfort with my suggeted anagram name reminded me of the mystical history of anagrams.

In Greek, anagram literally means “letters backward,” and originally names were read in this way to discover secrets of their bearers. Pure reversals proved limited, so letters were transposed instead.

Mystical readings of anagrams abound. Perhaps the most famous is the phrase Et in arcadia ego, which appears in at least two paintings of shepherds at a tomb by 17th century artist Nicolas Poussin, the more famous of which is Les Bergers d’Arcadie, below (click for a larger version in which the inscription is legible).

In reference to the painting, the phrase “et in Arcadia ego” is usually understood to mean “Even in Arcadia I [exist],” as if spoken by the angel of death. But, a conspiracy theory has it that the wonky Latin half-sentence suggests that it is really an anagram. The authors of a controversial book about Jesus, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, claim that the phrase correctly anagrams into I! Tego arcana dei, or “Go! I hold the secrets of God.” They interpret this latter phrase to suggest that the Poussin painting depicts the real tomb of Christ, at a location presumably discoverable by careful study of the image.

Depsite such drama, nominal uses of the anagram seem to have been the most common. Reportedly, through the middle ages some used anagrams as a kind of fortune telling, for example to help an individual choose a profession.

Later, writers used anagrams as pseudonyms. The most famous of these is surely the pen name of François-Marie Arouet, the younger. When hiswritten and abbreviated in French, his surname becomes”Arouet, l.j.” (le jeune), and anagrams to Voltaire. It doesn’t read like an anagram to us today, but remember that “u” and “v” are interchangeable in Latin, as are “i” and “j.”

But even as late as the 19th century, royals and masses alike sought to construct name anagrams that captured the essence of a person. An exmaple of one such effort: Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra becomes “Gave us a damned clever satire.” Nevermind that Cervantes also wrote Don Quixote in Spanish.

This idea of pinning the true nature of someone is at the heart of the best anagram name generator. There are better online anagram generators, which will offer literally dozens of possibilities for a name. But the fact that the best name anagram generator invokes “bestness” and offers only one name gives it an air of mystical certainty. That is why we can take such pleasure in the results it delivers:

Immanuel Kant’s anagram name is AM MAN-LIKE NUT

Thomas Aquinas’s anagram name is QUOTH: “I AM AN ASS”

Steve Jobs’s anagram name is JOVE’S BEST

Barack Obama’s anagram name is ABACK A RAMBO

The question that remains, of course, is what phrase created the title to this post, and what the result says about my having written it.