Credit Is Due

I would love to have taken Latin at some point in my schooling, to learn more about how our language has evolved. From where I sit, seven years of German was a semi-huge waste of time since you don't hear much of it in Texas. Seems like a dead language would have been a more productive undertaking.

I guess it's not too late if I want to be a life-long learner some-such, but I don't know if my abundant spare time would permit me the opportunity.

Who am I kidding? I don't make time to do things like that. File it away under Wisful Thinking behind learning to play the piano and chess. Someone please sit down and teach me to do those things one day- ball is in your court.

Anyway, I like knowing where people's names came from*, and why they were named that name in particular...

Two of my childhood friends, MK and MD, have the same first and middle name, both spelled the same way, because their mothers (who did not know each other at the time) read the same novel while they were pregnant.

An old coworker in New York was named after a legendary Dallas Cowboys football coach.

One of my childhood neighbors got her middle name because her dad loves the Rolling Stones and named his daughter after one of the band members' daughters. He even went to one of their concerts the night she was born.

FR's parents heard her first name used in an elevator in Las Vegas.

My own middle name is four generations deep with women on my mother's side of the family, which I love since boys are typically the ones named after family.

Since no one has ever asked, I'll tell you that the name of this blog actually came from a book. Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos, was a book I read for the 20th Century American Novel class taken the fall of my senior year of college, before I had seriously considered the idea of moving to New York. I unearthed it a few weeks ago, in preparation for my move, among several other novels from that year, while going through boxes that have been in storage for almost two years.

I remember it popping off the page of my syllabus when I glanced over the lengthy list of novels we would eventually cover. It's not the greatest book I've ever read (Pride and Prejudice holds that distinction), and it wasn't my favorite of that semester (Fitzgerald and Hemingway are tough competition).

If nothing else, the title made an impression.

*(Of course I would love to know how you were named and/or how you named your blog...)

What a good thing Adam had. When he said a good thing, he knew nobody had said it before.
-Mark Twain