With regard to Walter Shandy's insistence on certain ideas (such as his theories about the politics of France in the preceding chapter), Tristram tells about his father's theory of good and bad names and his skill in argument. When he had a particular notion, Walter Shandy "would move both heaven and earth, and twist and torture every thing in nature to support his hypothesis." One of his theories was that the child's name influenced his fortunes: Trismegistus and Archimedes were powerful names, Simkin and Nick were deadly names ("Nick, he said, was the DEVIL"), Jack, Dick, and Tom were neutral and worthless.
"But, of all the names in the universe, he had the most unconquerable aversion for TRISTRAM." "Who," asks Walter, "ever heard tell of a man, call'd Tristram, performing any thing great or worth recording?" "TRISTRAM . . . was unison to Nincompoop." Tristram calls the reader's attention to the title page of his book, and he asks us to sympathize with his father.
Addressing his female reader again, Tristram asks her, "How could you . . . be so inattentive in reading the last chapter?" After he sends her back to reread and find the point where he said that his mother was not a Catholic, he moralizes to the rest of his readers about people who skip the "deep erudition and knowledge" in a book and read only "in quest of the adventures."
When his female reader "returns," Tristram points out what she should have seen, and he then quotes the "Memorandum presented to the Doctors of the Sorbonne," a lengthy medical-legal-ethical document in French; the document deals with the question of whether a child can be baptized in the mother's womb by means of a small syringe. Tristram has an alternative suggestion: baptize all the "HOMUNCULI" at one time in the father "by means of a small syringe."
