As I’m sure almost all of you are aware, Toronto recently had its election for mayor. Much ink was spilled discussing the election, contemplating the results, pontificating on its meaning. Despite all that has been said about the election, the real point has been missed. Let me explain.
The three top vote getters in the election were, in order, Tory, Ford and Chow. Despite the emphasis on what made the candidates different there were at least two important things that they shared. First, all of their last names were four letters long. Second, all of their last names were also nouns (a proper noun in one case). It is also true that two of the names were verbs but we’ll leave that for the moment. On top of that, the previous mayor, also a Ford but a different Ford from the one that ended up running (it can get confusing) had a four letter proper noun name.