by Bill Bryson
They can perform this trick with even the simplest names, turning Sinclair into “sinkler,” Blackley into “blakely,” Blount into “blunt,” Bethune into “beeton,” Cockburn into “coburn,” Coke into “cook.” Lord Home becomes “lord hume,” the novelist Anthony Powell becomes “pole,” P. G. Wodehouse becomes “woodhouse,” the poet William Cowper becomes “cooper.” Caius College, Cambridge, is “keys,” while Magdalen College, Oxford, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, are both pronounced “mawdlin.”
I could go on and on. In fact, I think I will. Viscount Althorp pronounces his name “awltrop,” while the rather more sensible people of Althorp, the Northamptonshire village next to the viscount’s ancestral home, say “all-thorp.” The Scottish town of Auchinleck is pronounced “ock-in-leck,” but the local baron, Lord Boswell of Auchinleck, pronounces it “affleck.” There are two Barons Dalziel. One pronounces it “dalzeel,” the other “dee-ell.” The family name Ridealgh can be pronounced “ridalj” or “riddi-alsh.” Some members of the Pepys family pronounce it “peeps” as the great diarist Samuel Pepys did, but others say “peppiss” and still others say “pips.” The family name Hesmondhalgh can be “hezmondhaw,” “hezmondhalsh,” or “hezmondhawltch.” The surname generally said to have the most pronunciations is Featherstonehaugh, which can be pronounced in any of five ways: “feather-stun-haw,” “feerston-shaw,” “feston-haw,” “feeson-hay,” or (for those in a hurry) “fan-shaw.” But in fact there are two other names with five pronunciations: Coughtrey, which can be “kōtry,” “kawtry,” “kowtry,” “kootry,” and “kofftry,” and Wriotheseley, which can be “rottsly,” “rittsly,” “rizzli,” “rithly,” or “wriotheslee.”
The problem is so extensive, and the possibility of gaffes so omnipresent, that the BBC employs an entire pronunciation unit, a small group of dedicated orthoepists (professional pronouncers) who spend their working lives getting to grips with these illogical pronunciations so that broadcasters don’t have to do it on the air.
In short, there is scarcely an area of name giving in which the British don’t show a kind of wayward genius. Take street names. Just in the City of London, an area of one square mile, you can find Pope’s Head Alley, Mincing Lane, Garlick Hill, Crutched Friars, Threadneedle Street, Bleeding Heart Yard, Seething Lane. In the same compact area you can find churches named St. Giles Cripplegate, St. Sepulchre Without Newgate, All Hallows Barking, and the practically unbeatable St. Andrews-by-the-Wardrobe. But those are just their everyday names: Oftentimes the full, official titles are even more breathtaking, as with The Lord Mayor’s Parish Church of St. Stephen Walbrook and St. Swithin Londonstone, St. Benet Sheerhogg and St. Mary Bothall with St. Laurence Pountney, which is, for all that, just one church.
Equally arresting are British pub names. Other people are content to dub their drinking establishment with pedestrian names like Harry’s Bar and the Greenwood Lounge. But a Briton, when he wants to sup ale, must find his way to the Dog and Duck, the Goose and Firkin, the Flying Spoon, or the Spotted Dog. The names of Britain’s 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the improbable, from the deft to the daft. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners—this is a basic requirement of most British institutions—and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. Among the pubs that meet, and indeed exceed, these exacting standards are the Frog and Nightgown, the Bull and Spectacles, the Flying Monk, and the Crab and Gumboil.
However unlikely a pub’s name may sound, there is usually some explanation rooted in the depths of history. British inns were first given names in Roman times, 2,000 years ago, but the present quirky system dates mostly from the Middle Ages, when it was deemed necessary to provide travelers, most of them illiterate, with some sort of instantly recognizable symbol.
The simplest approach, and often the most prudent, was to adopt a royal or aristocratic coat of arms. Thus a pub called the White Hart indicates ancient loyalty to Richard II (whose decree it was, incidentally, that all inns should carry signs), while an Eagle and Child denotes allegiance to the Earls of Derby and a Royal Oak commemorates Charles II, who was forced to hide in an oak tree after being defeated by Cromwell during the English Civil War. (If you look carefully at the pub sign, you can usually see the monarch hiding somewhere in the branches.) The one obvious shortcoming of such a system was that names had to be hastily changed every time a monarch was toppled. Occasionally luck would favor the publicans, as when Richard III (symbolized by a white boar) was succeeded by the Earl of Oxford (blue boar) and amends could be simply effected with a pot of paint. But pubkeepers quickly realized that a more cost-effective approach was to stick to generic names, which explains why there are so many pubs called the Queen’s Head (about 300), King’s Head (400), and Crown (the national champion at more than 1,000).
Many pubs owe their names to popular sports (the Cricketers, the Fox and Hounds, the Cockpit), or to the workaday pursuits of the people who once drank in them. Pubs like the Plough, the Fleece, the Woolpack, and the Shepherd’s Rest were clearly designed for farmers and farmworkers. The Boot was for cobblers, the Anchor for sailors, and the Shoulder of Mutton for butchers. Not all references are so immediately evident. The Beetle and Wedge in Berkshire sounds hopelessly obscure until you realize that a beetle and wedge were basic tools of carpenters 200 years ago.
Many of the very oldest pub names represent religious themes—the Crossed Keys, the Seven Stars, the Hope and Anchor. The Lamb and Flag, a fairly common name in Britain still, was the symbol of the Knights Templar, who rode to the Crusades, and the Saracen’s Head and Turk’s Head commemorate their enemies’ fate. Still other pub names are built around catchphrases, homilies, puns, and bits of philosophy, or are simply of unknown provenance. Names such as the Tumbledown Dick, First and Last, Mortal Man, Romping Donkey, Ram Jam Inn, Live and Let Live, and Man with a Load of Mischief (the sign outside depicts a man with a woman slung over his shoulder) all fall resoundingly into this category.
The picture is further clouded by the consideration that many pub names have been corrupted over the centuries. The Pig and Whistle is said to have its roots in peg (a drinking vessel) and wassail (a festive drink). The Goat and Compasses is sometimes said to come from “God Encompasseth Us.” The Elephant and Castle, originally a pub and now a district of London, may have been the Infanta de Castille. The Old Bull and Bush, a famous pub on Hampstead Heath, is said to come from Boulogne Bouche and to commemorate a battle in France. Some of these derivations may be fanciful, but there is solid evidence to show that the Dog and Bacon was once the Dorking Beacon, that the Cat and Fiddle was once Caterine la Fidèle (at least it is recorded as such in the Domesday Book), and that the Ostrich Inn in Buckinghamshire began life as the Hospice Inn.
All this is by way of introducing, in a decidedly roundabout manner, how we came to acquire our own names. The study of names is onomastics. For much of history, surnames, or last names, were not considered necessary. Two people named, say, Peter living in the same hamlet might adopt or be given second names to help distinguish them from each other—so that one might be called Peter White-Head and the other Peter Son of John (or Johnson)—but these additional names were seldom passed on. The business of acquiring surnames was a long one that evolved over centuries rather than years. As might be expected, it began at the top of the social scale and worked its way down. In England last names did not become usual until after the Norman conquest, and in many other European countries, such as Holland, they evolved much later still. Most surnames come ultimately, if not always obviously, from one of four sources: place-names (e.g., Lincoln, Worthington), nicknames (Whitehead, Armstrong), trade names (Smith, Carpenter), and patronymics, that is names indicating a familial relation
ship (Johnson, Robertson). In his lifetime a person might be known by a variety of names—for instance, as Peter the Butcher Who Lives by the Well at Putney Green or some such. This would eventually transmute into Peter Butcher or Peter Green or Peter Wells. Often in such cases the person would take his name from the figure on a nearby inn sign. In the Middle Ages, when the ability to read could scarcely be assumed, it was common for certain types of businesses to have symbols outside their doors. The striped barber pole is a holdover from those days. A wine merchant would always have a bush by his front door. Hence his neighbor might end up being called George Bush.
Two events gave a boost to the adoption of surnames in England. The first was the introduction of a poll tax in 1379, which led the government to collect the name of every person in the country aged sixteen or over, and the second was the enactment of the Statute of Additions in 1413, which required that all legal documents contain not just the person’s given name, but also his or her occupation and place of abode. These two pieces of medieval bureaucracy meant that virtually everyone had to settle on a definite and fixed surname.
It’s surprising how many medieval occupations are embedded in modern family names. Some are obvious: Bowman, Archer, Carpenter, Shepherd, Forrester. But many others are not, either because the craft has died or become rare, as with Fuller (a cleanser of cloths) and Fletcher (a maker of bows and arrows) or because the spelling has been corrupted in some way, as with Bateman (a corrupted form of boatman) or because the name uses a regionalism, as with Akerman (a provincial word for a plowman). It mustn’t be forgotten that this was a time of great flux in the English language, when many regional spellings and words were competing for dominance. Thus such names as Hill, Hall, and Hull could all originally have meant Hill but come from different parts of the country. Smith is the most common name in America and Britain, but it is also one of the most common in nearly every other European language. The German Schmidt, the French Ferrier, Italian Ferraro, Spanish Herrero, Hungarian Kovacs, and Russian Kusnetzov are all Smiths.
English names based on places almost always had prepositions to begin with but these gradually disappeared, so that John of Preston became just John Preston, though occasionally they survive in names like Atwater and Underwood or as remnants in names like Noakes (a contraction of atten Oakes, or “by the oak trees”) or Nash (for atten Ash, “by the ash tree”). A curious fact about names based on places is that they are so often obscure—mostly from places that few people have heard of. Why should there be so many more Middletons than Londons, so many more Worthingtons than Bristols? The main cities of medieval Britain—London, York, Norwich, Glasgow—are relatively uncommon as surnames even though many thousands of people lived there. To understand this seeming paradox you must remember that the purpose of surnames is to distinguish one person or family from the great mass of people. If a person called himself Peter of London, he would be just one of hundreds of such Peters and anyone searching for him would be at a loss. So as a rule a person would become known as Peter of London only if he moved to a rural location, where London would be a clear identifying feature, but that did not happen often. In the same way, those people named Farmer probably owe their name to the fact that an ancestor left the farm, while names like French, Fleming, Welch, or Walsh (both from Welsh) indicate that the originator was not a resident of those places but rather an emigrant.
Another superficially puzzling thing is why many people have ecclesiastical names like Bishop, Monk, Priest, and Prior when such figures were presumably celibate and unable to pass on their names. The reason here is that part of the original name has probably been lost. The full name may once have been the “Bishop’s man” if he was a servant or “Priest’s Hill” if that was where he lived.
The origins of other names are not immediately apparent because they come from non-English sources. Russell was from the medieval French roussell, “red-haired,” while Morgan is Welsh for white-haired. Sometimes strange literal meanings are hidden in innocuous-sounding names. Kennedy, means “ugly head” in Gaelic, Boyd means “yellow-faced or sickly,” Campbell means “crooked mouth.” The same is equally true of other languages. As Mario Pei notes, Gorky means “bitter,” Tolstoy means “fat,” and Machiavelli means “bad nails.” Cicero is Roman slang for a wart on the nose (it means literally “chickpea”).
In America, the situation with surnames is obviously complicated by the much greater diversity of backgrounds of the people. Even so, 183 of the 200 most common last names in America are British. However, a few names that are common in America are noticeably less common in Britain. Johnson is the second most common name in the United States (after Smith), but comes much further down the list in Britain. The reason for this is of course the great influx of Swedes to America in the nineteenth century—though in fact Johnson is not a native Swedish name. It is an Americanizing of the Swedish Jonsson or Johansson. Another name much more often encountered in America than Britain is Miller. In Britain, millers were unpopular throughout much of history because of their supposed tendency to cheat the farmers who brought them grain. So it was not a flattering name. A modern equivalent might be the name Landlord. Most Millers in America were in fact originally Muellers or Müllers. The German word had the same meaning but did not carry the same derisory connotations.
Many, perhaps most, immigrants to America modified their names in some way to accommodate American spellings and phonics. Often, with difficult Polish or Russian names, this was involuntary; immigrants simply had new names given to them at their port of entry. But more often the people willingly made changes to blend into their adopted country more smoothly and to avoid the constant headache of having to spell their name to everyone. Far easier to change Pfoersching to Pershing, Wistinghausen to Westinghouse, Pappadimitracoupolos to Pappas, Niewhuis to Newhouse, Kuiper to Cooper, Schumacher to Shoemaker, Krankheit to Cronkite, Sjögren to Seagren, Lindqvist to Lindquist, and so on. It wasn’t just difficult Slavic and Germanic names that this happened with. Scots named McLeod generally changed the spelling of their name to make it conform with its pronunciation, McCloud, and those named McKay usually gave up telling people that it rhymed with sky (as it still does in Britain).
Sometimes people took the opportunity to get rid of undesirable surnames which had been imposed on their ancestors during periods of subjugation. Often these were offensive—either because the giver had a wayward sense of humor or because he hoped to be bribed into making it something less embarrassing. For instance, the Greek name Kolokotronis translates as “bullet in the ass.” But others kept their names—for instance, the Goldwaters, even though that name was long a synonym for urine.
Another change names sometimes underwent in America was to have the stress altered. For some reason, in American speech there is a decided preference to stress the last or next to last syllable in a person’s name. Thus Italians coming to America who called themselves “Es-PO-si-to” had the name changed to “Es-po-SI-to.” Again, this happened with British names as well. Purcell, Bernard, and Barnett, which are pronounced in Britain as “persul,” “bernurd,” and “barnutt,” became in America “pur-SELL,” “ber-NARD,” and “bar-NETT.” But this process wasn’t extended to all names: Mitchell and Barnum, for instance, were left with the stress on the first syllable.
Over time most names have been variously battered and knocked about. We have already seen how the name Waddington was variously rendered as Wadigton, Wuldingdoune, Windidune, and so on. Shakespeare’s grandfather usually called himself Shakestaff.* Snooks might have started life as Sevenoaks, the name of a town in Kent. Backus might have been Bakehouse. James K. Polk, the eleventh U.S. president, was descended from people named Pollock. Few names haven’t been changed at some time or other in their history. This is often most vividly demonstrated in place-names.
Cambridge, for instance, was called Grantanbrycge in the tenth century. But the conquering Normans found that a mouthful—they particularly had trouble with gr combina
tions—and began to spell it Canterbrigie. Then it became successively Caumbrigge. Cambrugge, and Caunbrige before finally arriving at its modern spelling. Centuries from now it may be something else again. By a similarly convoluted process Eboracum eventually metamorphosed into York.
These verbal transformations can be remarkably convoluted. Brightlingsea, according to P. H. Reaney’s The Origin of English Place Names, has been spelled 404 ways since the first interloper began to tinker with the Celtic Brictrich. Moreover, because of varying influences a single root may have evolved into a variety of words—Brighton, Brixton, Brislington, and Bricklehampton, improbable as it seems, all began life with the same name: Beorhthelmes.
The successive waves of invading Celts, Romans, Danes, Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Normans all endlessly shaped and reshaped British place-names. The result is that England possesses some of the most resplendent place-names in the world—names that roll around on the tongue and fill the mouth like fine claret: Wendens Ambo, Saffron Walden, Gussage All Saints, Stocking Pelham, Farleigh Wallop, Dunton Bassett, Husbands Bosworth. There are 30,000 place-names in Britain and at least half of them are arresting and distinctive—far more than can be accounted for by random activity. They are as integral a part of the glory of the British countryside as thatched cottages, wandering hedgerows, and meadows full of waving buttercups and darting butterflies. As with family names, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the British have such distinctive place-names not because they just accidentally evolved, but rather because the British secretly like living in places with names like Lower Slaughter and Great Snoring.
