Getting personal

by the Editor

ëI have no connection with the Lord Chancellor of England, Sir Christopher Hatton (1540-1591),í he writes. ëMy first name spelling is from the German ìwir hätten gehabt,î with the umlaut removed. The joke was on my father because they were expecting a girl: ìwe would have had.î I hesitate to mention my middle name Schuyler that comes from the Revolutionary Major General Philip J. Schuyler.í

Why donít we start at the beginning? With Adam? This name comes from the Hebrew word for man, but it also has a link to red earth:

Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life. [Genesis 2, 7]

But there are names that come from a more solid geological foundation, that of rock itself. These are nearly all boysí names and the most obvious is Peter. This is from the Greek word petra, a rock and the same root which we find in petrology, petrography and, ultimately, petroleum. Not wanting to dwell too much on the Bible, but the apostle Simon was allegedly named Peter by Jesus because he was to be the rock on which he would build his church [Matthew 16, 18]. It is an interesting speculation, but had Jesus and his disciples lived in Scotland, Simon might have been called Craig, for this comes from the Gaelic word for rock. The name Arthur is also believed to be of Celtic origin, this being derived from the Irish for stone.

If rocks are dominantly a male preserve, then the fairer sex gets more than its fair share of precious stones. The most common are Amber and Auriel (from the Latin for gold), Beryl and Ruby, but there are also Sapphire and Amethyst, Opal, Topaz and Chrysoprase (just checking to see who was awake!). There is another precious-stone name which, like amber, owes its origins more to biology than geology and that is Pearl. This comes from the French word perle. But there is another, far more common pearl name, one that comes from the Greek margarite, meaning pearl and giving the French name Marguerite and the English and Scots name Margaret. So all the Maggies and the Maisies, the Megans, the Mays and the Marjorys, to say nothing of the Peggies, Gretas and Ritas are pearls too.

Many of the other names that have a geological provenance stem from landforms, dominantly Celtic and Norse ones. Glyn and Glynis come from the Welsh word glyn, a valley, and a very near relative of the Scots word and name Glen. The Norse word for valley gives us Dale, also a boyís name and probably derived from the surname. The name Brynmore, also Welsh, comes from bryn mawr, a big hill while the Scots name Kyle, which, like Dale, probably comes from the surname, is a point where the sea narrows between two bodies of land.

Islands are landforms that are surrounded by water. Actually, the word ëislandí itself has an interesting derivation. the Latin word insula seems to be the root of the French word île, the English word isle, the Gaelic word innis and the Scots word inch. The English word ëislandí is a concatenation of isle and land, implying something rather larger than simply an isle. The Scots names Ila and Innes, Isla and Ailsa are all islands, as are Iona, an island off Mull famous for its monastery and marble, and Rona, an  island off Skye and several other places, in turn derived from  the Gaelic ron, meaning seal.

And so we come to the sea itself. The name Marina comes from the Latin mare and means ëof the seaí, whereas the name Dylan is Welsh, meaning a wave, and is also the name of an ancient Celtic sea-god. Lastly Morgan is a Welsh name meaning ëof the seaí. Its female form is Morgana, a name famous in Arthurian legend, for she was the sorceress who outwitted Merlin and eventually led to the downfall of Arthur. The whole story is clearly one of coastal erosion, where the sea in the shape of Morgana breaks down the rock and stone in the shape of Arthur to leave sand, which brings us back to AdamÖ for from dust we were created and unto dust we shall return [Genesis 3, 19].