Elective Semantectomy

By the time his first incarnation left Gallifrey, (TV: The Name of the Doctor) the Doctor had put aside his true name. (PROSE: Return of the Living Dad)

The Elective Semantectomy was a temporal engineering procedure by which a member of the Great Houses could remove their true name from history and replace it with an impersonal title of their choosing.

Nature

In most cases, this was done to protect a bloodline from embarrassment due to association with a renegade member, (PROSE: Weapons Grade Snake Oil) as the full names of many Houseworlders included the name of their Great House. (PROSE: Lungbarrow, The Book of the War, Against Nature, AUDIO: Body Politic, Panacea)

By one account, names held mystic importance in Time Lord society, meaning that all Time Lords kept their true names as closely-guarded secrets. In this sense, the Doctor's name was not any more or less significant than any other Time Lord's. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Terror of the Autons)

History

The Doctor

Before the Doctor left Gallifrey, he and the Master erased their names from history in the "names experiment" so that only they remembered, (AUDIO: Blood of the Time Lords) the Doctor breaking his name into thirty-eight pieces. During his travels, he spread them throughout the universe. (PROSE: Return of the Living Dad) In one account of the Doctor's past, the Doctor's father erased both of their names from history. (PROSE: Unnatural History)

Accounts of the Doctor's early life before the First Doctor had them known as the Other, (PROSE: Lungbarrow) the Stranger, (AUDIO: Patience) or the Doctor, (TV: Fugitive of the Judoon, The Timeless Children) with one account having the unidentified individual who would eventually become the Doctor being found by a Gallifreyan explorer, becoming known as the Timeless Child. (TV: The Timeless Children)

Other cases

The Time Lord originally known as Caleera became the Sonomancer and later the Red Lady. (AUDIO: Scenes From Her Life, The Sonomancer, The Red Lady)

Some of the first members of the Great Houses to shed their names and take on new ones were actually the Mappers who first explored the Spiral Politic after the anchoring of the thread, who all went insane sometime after finishing their work. However, instead of the "titles and stuff" which typified later Renegades, they chose "really stupid names" (in Intrepid's opinion) based on a timekeeping theme, such as Astrolabe or Pendulum. (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice)

One Prydonian Cardinal left everything behind, "even his name", when he went into self-imposed exile on Earth after the Prydonian Academy Revolution, although, given that he engaged in no breach of the non-interference policy, the High Council did not regard him as a criminal. This Time Lord would go on to adopt the name of the Colonel. (GAME: The Legions of Death ^[+]Loading...["The Legions of Death (game)"])

During the War in Heaven, some Homeworlders volunteered to undergo Semantectomy before being stationed among the lesser species, due to fears that adopting a local name might lead to conceptual contamination. (PROSE: Weapons Grade Snake Oil)

Rassilon erased the names of his dissenters from time. (TV: The End of Time, PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords)

After the Woman and the Patriarch of Stillhaven dissented to Rassilon's plan for the Ultimate Sanction during the Last Great Time War, (TV: The End of Time, PROSE: Lords and Masters) Rassilon had the Woman's name erased from time. (PROSE: A Brief History of Time Lords)

Professor H Lennistein wrote about the Elective Semantectomy in his 31441 book The Great Houses And Us. (PROSE: Weapons Grade Snake Oil)

Behind the scenes

• In an interview in DWM 490, Steven Moffat proposed that Dr. Who recklessly altering Time to change the outcome of the bank robbery at the end of Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D. caused him to accidentally restart the universe, rewriting himself into a Time Lord and losing his family name.

External links

• Elective Semantectomy at the Faction Paradox wiki