What’s in a Name?

They called me John Norman, after my two grandfathers. But my Canadian grandfather got to me first, picked me up and said, “Wee Normie”. So it stuck. I got to be one of those unlucky people who goes by the middle name. Bureaucrats hate people like me. But it builds character, so I passed the blessing along to two of my four kids.

Grandad was not actually Norman, but Normand. His mother was francophone. It also turns out that I was given a fairly popular name for my generation, at least if you are Jewish, which I’m not.

Normand is a French regional descriptor, denoting a person from Normandy, which in turn was so named after the Northmen who had settled there in the early middle ages. In the same way, many other common enough French names are of geographical origin: Gascon, Picard, D’Avignon, Parisien, Langlois, Lallemand, and so on.

Names of people and names of places reveal forgotten stories. Lincoln, for instance, is a curious mix of the Celtic Lin, for “lake”, and the Roman Latin word for colony, hence a “colony by the lake”.

During the Age of Colonization, Europeans splashed European place names all over the map of the “New World”, assuming that the coasts and the mountains they were “discovering” had no names and therefore needed them. Except for a few uninhabited islands, this of course was not the case.

Many European names given to New World locations have outshone their donor locations. New Yorkers would generally be hard pressed to find York on a map of England, and it comes as a surprise to kids growing up in Halifax or Boston that there is “another” Halifax or Boston, “over there somewhere”.

More recently there has been a decolonization of names, a reversion to names which actually existed before Europeans showed up (can you believe it?) Bombay has reverted to Mumbai. New Zealand is also Aotearoa, and the Mi’kmaq name Abegweit is increasingly taking pride of place again in Prince Edward Island (also known to locals as “The Island”, as if it were the only one.)

What’s in a name? Usually a good story and a deeper understanding of the person or the place.