No man is an island, but some of us are rivers

From Wikipedia: “The Brague is a river in France in the département of Alpes-Maritimes and the région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur. The Brague takes its source near Châteauneuf-Grasse and ends in the Mediterranean Sea near Antibes.

“Between Valbonne and Biot, a 9 km long path follows the river. Part of the Brague Valley is covered by a Park called the "Parc Départemental de la Brague".

“The Brague is 21 km long.”

If, like our friend Vagabonde, you would prefer to read it in French, there’s always this article from the French Wikipedia.

The best-known person named Brague alive today may be Rémi Brague (1947- ), a French historian of philosophy, specializing in the Arabic, Jewish, and Christian thought of the Middle Ages. He is professor emeritus of Arabic and religious philosophy at the Sorbonne, and Romano Guardini chair of philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Ancestry.com says it has 1,832,877 historical documents and family trees with Brague, and 793,114 of them are births, marriages, and deaths.

For a name that I have always thought was not a common one, that’s more Bragues than you can shake a stick at.

I don’t think the Bragues in France rhyme their name with plague. I think if they rhyme it at all they rhyme it with log or cog or jog or hog or possibly even polliwog. Perhaps the Bragues in the southern U.S. rhyme their name with plague to remind the locals not to confuse us with U.S. Confederate General Braxton Bragg (1817-1876), after whom Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was named.

I have been called Bragg and Brah-goo and Brah-gay and even Brah-gah.

If you’re ever in our neck of the woods and feel like dropping in, the troops at Fort Bragg will show you how to do it properly.

Some of them may even help you locate our house:

Just be sure to pronounce our name correctly.

If this post is not to your liking, go find a river and shake a stick at it.

A rose by any other name

In case you were wondering about the blogname, what rhymes with plague is my name, and no, my name isn't Greg or Craig or Meg, not that there would be anything wrong with that. My name is Robert. Robert Henry, in fact. But no one calls me that. Everyone calls me Bob, except friends from my childhood who still call me Bobby. I hate it when that happens. I guess in Spanish my name would be Roberto Enrico and in French it would be something like Ro-bair Anh-ree. But I digress. It's my surname, Brague, that rhymes with plague. I've been called Brahg (as in Prague, Czechoslovakia, or I guess that should be Czech Republic) and Brah-goo and Brah-gay and Brock (by people who must think the 'g' is a 'q'), Bruh-zhay, and even Buh-rah-guh. Whatever. The most common mispronunciation over the years, though, perhaps because I've lived most of my life in the southern part of the U.S., has been Bragg, as in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, which I believe was named after the Confederate General, Braxton Bragg. Or maybe not.

So, anyway, I tried to devise a way to help people remember the correct pronunciation (well, MY family's pronunciation, at least, because I also learned that there is a river in France called La Brague that is probably pronounced Brahg, given what little I understand about European vowels -- you know, ah, ay, ee, oh, oo). I tried saying that my name "rhymes with ham and egg" but people began spelling it Bregg. I bet Sean Hannity (rhymes with sanity, inanity, manatee) has the same trouble with his first name; I bet he has to tell people that Sean doesn't rhyme with lean, mean, green machine, it rhymes with on the lawn at dawn I saw a fawn. Well, as Ronald Reagan said, there I go again. Digressing, I mean. Actually, he said, "There YOU go again," and he wasn't talking about digressing and he said it in 1980 to Jimmy Carter during a debate. I finally decided to tell people that my name "rhymes with plague" because not only does that give them a leg up on the correct spelling (a mnemonic device, as it were), I think it also conveys just the right level of irritation I have with needing to tell them in the first place.

Cheers.