Today we mark the 1931 print debut of Dick Tracy. Chester Gould created and drew the eponymous cartoon strip for more than four decades, during which the square-jawed police detective battled law-breakers, stood tall for law-abiding citizens, and encouraged youth to fight crime. In Gould's (and Tracy's) worlds, the good guys and the bad guys were easily distinguished. Their names alone made it clear who was on the right side of the law (girlfriend and later wife Tess Trueheart and partner Sam Catchem) and who was on the wrong side (the villains Pruneface, Mumbles, Mister Crime, Stooge Viller and Trigger Doom come to mind). (来源：http://www.EnglishCN.com)

Gould's creative naming reminded us of the concept of nominative determinism, that is, the idea that a name determines (or at least influences) a person's behavior or character. Consider Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Raskolnikov, that tortured soul whose name translates from Russian roughly as "schism or split." Or Ian Fleming's James Bond, a name chosen, according to its creator, to be "brief, anonymous, and masculine." But because these names all belong to fictional characters, they might better be termed aptronyms, names aptly suited to their owners.