Is Iowa Seeking A Diane Monopoly?

Mr. Bond, they have a saying in Chicago: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.”

Supervillain Auric Goldfinger

This will be a relatively short and—presumably—relatively pointless post. But this is something I think about a lot. Not only do I think about this a lot—and by that I mean probably every day I spend a moment or two wondering about this—but I have no idea what this might mean. And for the most part I don’t think it can mean anything. Nonetheless, I think about this a lot.


I’ve known three women in my life named “Diane.” All three have gone to Iowa.


A few decades ago my brother married a woman named Diane. They left Chicago when my brother’s job moved. They followed the job to Iowa.

A couple of decades after that I worked in the corporate world with a beautiful businesswoman named Diane. She left Chicago when her husband got a professorship at an Iowa college.

Just recently the prettiest checkout girl at our local grocery store—Diane!—went off to college in Iowa.

[I miss this last Diane. I wrote about her in: Diane And The Can Of Squid (1 of 5) and Diane And The Can Of Squid (2 of 5) and Diane And The Can Of Squid (3 of 5) and Diane And The Can Of Squid (4 of 5) and Diane And The Can Of Squid (5 of 5)]


What’s up with all these women named Diane going to Iowa?

I don’t know. I don’t know what can be up with something like this.

When I meet people interested in onomatology and/or toponomy I always bring up this. They always smile. The going theory is that things like this are just statistical clusters and statistical clusters always look odd from the inside, but from the outside they’re just random groupings with no particular meaning at all.

I don’t know.

But if you’re a girl named Diane and you don’t want to go to Iowa you better hope we never meet.