A rose by any other name would smell as sweet

Shakespeare said that.

Today I want to talk about names, last names to be specific. I will give you a couple of examples from my own history that will lead you, hopefully not by the nose, into a little light reading meant to take your mind off being quarantined lo, these many days.

When Mrs. RWP's father arrived in Boston from Italy in 1917, his name was Dhimitri Kuçi, but on his grave marker in Florida it is James Cudse. His passport was Italian but he himself was from Albania. How his name got changed is a mystery. My theory is that somebody along the way -- an immigration official, an employer, a naturalization know-it-all, a friend -- suggested it as a way of dispensing with the cedilla. My future father-in-law, an easy-going sort of guy, went along with it. Nobody seems to know for sure. That still doesn't explain how the K became a C.

His wife's name was Ksanthipi in Albania (not unlike the Greek woman named Xanthippe who was the wife of Socrates) but her grave marker says Carrie. Go figure.

If you had asked my dad (non-bio) what kind of name Brague was, he would have said "Welsh" without hesitation and trotted out the family lore story, unproven, of seven brothers who came to the United States from Wales and all but one of whom moved on to Australia. This story is apocryphal at best. I always said, "Dad, with that -gue ending the name has to be French; it probably came over to the British Isles after the Norman Conquest" (which, if you didn't know, occurred in 1066 when William the Conqueror defeated Harold at the Battle of Hastings).

My mother was a Silberman although it may have been Silbermann back in Germany, but it was never Silverman. My mother said (I don't know whether it is accurate) that Silberman was a German Jewish name and Silverman was Russian. In America, people always get the two names mixed up. I have said on many occasions, "Silberman, with a B, not a V" and it is darned irritating to have to do so. In fact, when I was doing family research using the 1940 census, one of my mother's brothers had completely disappeared. I found his family (Sol, Naomi, Joan, and Eileen) in the right town but spelled the other way, with a V instead of a B, by a none-too-attentive census-taker. Back in those days, census takers went house to house with a big book and wrote everything down in it themselves. None of this do-it-yourself, mail it in stuff.

Longtime readers of this blog may remember reading about the Brague River in southeastern France or the Château de Brague winery in the Bordeaux region of western France. Both of these examples bolster my theory if only in my own mind. I suppose that in Europe my surname rhymes with Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia (if there still were a Czechoslovakia), but here in the good old U. S. of A. it has always rhymed with, well, you know what.

Anyhoo, all of that is neither here nor there, except as a lead-in to the article I now present for your entertainment and reading edification:

Why 40% of Vietnamese People Have the Same Last Name

So if the readers of this blog were Vietnamese they might be Adrian Nguyen, Rachel Nguyen, Pam Nguyen, Bonnie Nguyen, Kathy Nguyen, Graham Nguyen, Red Nguyen, Sue Nguyen, Ian Nguyen, Kylie Nguyen, Michelle Nguyen, Tasker Nguyen, and Ho Chi Pudding.

Until next time, as they say in Ethiopia: Abyssinia.