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Proper Nouns
Monday, October 2nd, 2006 by joelIf I trace my name back to the original Hebrew, it translates roughly as “Jehovah is God.� Now consider this: the Hebrews actually named their kids this. When my parents named me, they pulled a pretty name from the Bible. They may have looked up the meaning before they gave it to me, but no WAY they were going to call me “He who cries a lot.� In English, we refuse to use names that have meanings IN ENGLISH. We will gladly use names in other languages, relieved at the responsibility for sounding silly.
While other cultures don’t have a problem calling a big river “Big River� and that becomes its proper name, we will only call it that if we can ignore the fact that “Rio Grande� has a meaning.
At some point in our history, we DID use last names in a literal sense. “Smith� would be a tradesman, “Girdwood� would be a man who puts metal bands around wood for some strange reason. Weirdos. But in everything else, we seem to be the only culture that does not name things properly to be what they really are. Why is that?
