Since yesterday's post, I have been thinking a lot about names.
Having been born with an Eastern European tonguetwister of a surname, I've always been fascinated by other people's nomenclatures. I absolutely love my unusual name - we're the only family in South Africa to have it, and in fact, even though I've done a search in the phone books of every town I've travelled to, I've never been able to find anyone else with it. I love that it speaks of an entire family history - it's taken directly from the town the family originally hailed from in what's now Belarus, and it travelled with my various ancestors as they traversed Europe, avoiding programs and Holocausts, until we landed here - a mining town on the southern tip of Africa that's as far from a snow-covered shtetl as one could get.
There's also a spiteful part of me that simply loves hearing people chewing on it like a piece of steak that's too big to fit in their mouths - even though it has a respectable ratio of vowels to consonants (until other surnames from the same region) and is essentially phonetic. It's especially fun to hear call centre agents wrestle with it. In this case, rather than helping them out by saying "just call me by my first name", I listen to them labour over all three syllables like a remedial six-year-old struggling to learn to read.
My great love of my surname is the reason why I didn't change it when I got married. Also, I felt a little peeved having to swap my distinctive name for one that is a dime a dozen in South Africa. I have tried, rather unsuccessfully, to double barrel it. The combination of Jewish and Afrikaans just doesn't sound right - it's like Abromowitz-Van Jaarsveld or Rosenberg-Labuschagne. Doesn't have quite the same ring as Norwood-Young, does it. The result that is that I sound like a new South Africa type law firm - we have the Jewish, we have the Afrikaans, we just need a Zulu partner. People don't even try hide their amusement - the other day, my doctor's receptionist, making an appointment, blatantly sniggered as she said, "Just listen to this patient's surname".
Which is why I love watching the end credits of movies, which present a real opportunity to find names freakish and fabulous. The Olympics was another grand occasion for me, for the same reason - hedre was an entire globe full of people with weird and wonderful tags. My personal favourite was a competitor in the hurdles, whose surname was Stumblova. Another athlete was called Smellie - how's that for unfortunate. And as for the swimmer, Rebecca Poon - enough said. Actually, maybe I have just one more thing to say. I have a friend called June, and if she were to marry Rebecca's brother, the results would be hilarious. Oh, and how could I forget the Chinese contendor Ding Ling who plays - guess what? Ping Pong.
Having been born with an Eastern European tonguetwister of a surname, I've always been fascinated by other people's nomenclatures. I absolutely love my unusual name - we're the only family in South Africa to have it, and in fact, even though I've done a search in the phone books of every town I've travelled to, I've never been able to find anyone else with it. I love that it speaks of an entire family history - it's taken directly from the town the family originally hailed from in what's now Belarus, and it travelled with my various ancestors as they traversed Europe, avoiding programs and Holocausts, until we landed here - a mining town on the southern tip of Africa that's as far from a snow-covered shtetl as one could get.
There's also a spiteful part of me that simply loves hearing people chewing on it like a piece of steak that's too big to fit in their mouths - even though it has a respectable ratio of vowels to consonants (until other surnames from the same region) and is essentially phonetic. It's especially fun to hear call centre agents wrestle with it. In this case, rather than helping them out by saying "just call me by my first name", I listen to them labour over all three syllables like a remedial six-year-old struggling to learn to read.
My great love of my surname is the reason why I didn't change it when I got married. Also, I felt a little peeved having to swap my distinctive name for one that is a dime a dozen in South Africa. I have tried, rather unsuccessfully, to double barrel it. The combination of Jewish and Afrikaans just doesn't sound right - it's like Abromowitz-Van Jaarsveld or Rosenberg-Labuschagne. Doesn't have quite the same ring as Norwood-Young, does it. The result that is that I sound like a new South Africa type law firm - we have the Jewish, we have the Afrikaans, we just need a Zulu partner. People don't even try hide their amusement - the other day, my doctor's receptionist, making an appointment, blatantly sniggered as she said, "Just listen to this patient's surname".
Which is why I love watching the end credits of movies, which present a real opportunity to find names freakish and fabulous. The Olympics was another grand occasion for me, for the same reason - hedre was an entire globe full of people with weird and wonderful tags. My personal favourite was a competitor in the hurdles, whose surname was Stumblova. Another athlete was called Smellie - how's that for unfortunate. And as for the swimmer, Rebecca Poon - enough said. Actually, maybe I have just one more thing to say. I have a friend called June, and if she were to marry Rebecca's brother, the results would be hilarious. Oh, and how could I forget the Chinese contendor Ding Ling who plays - guess what? Ping Pong.
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