MarysLibrary

What's in a Surname?

What's in a Surname? A Journey from Abercrombie to Zwicker was published Thursday and reviewed yesterday in theguardian Books, an online daily review and commentary about books and reading to which I go every morning even before I read my email and check in on Facebook. In his theguardian discussion of the book, Sam Leith tells us some of the more charming name lore:

'[D]id you know that the name "Shaw" is an Anglicisation of "Macghillesheathanaich"? Did you know why so many people in Wales are called Jones? (Surnames arrived late there). Or that ffoulkeses, far from being posh, get their lower-case double-f from an illiteracy: "ff", on an old document somewhere, was used to signify a capital F and was incorporated into the lineage by someone who didn't understand the convention? Likewise, all those people who claim to be able to trace their names back to the conquest are in error: "the eminent surname expert David Hey says only people called Malet, Mallet or Mallett have an undisputed right to make such a claim"'.

I assuredly did not know that about the name Shaw and I had no idea the Darcys were of more recent origin than they claimed. I did know that the most popular name in England is Smith. Scotland too. And that you don't pronounce Featherstonhaugh the way it looks.

David McKie's investigation of English, Scottish, and Welsh family names begins with a visit to the graveyard. (I can only tell you about the beginning of the book because I've only read the first chapter.) The graveyard, or rather graveyards - he investigates six of them in towns of the same name, Broughton - yield different clusters of names depending where in England it's located - Furness or Hampshire or wherever. Hattats and Dowses in one place, Gilpins, Sawreys, and Cooksons in another.

As I say, I've read only the beginning of the book but so far it's filled with that sort of useless information that can be absolutely captivating. I have a few books about names (The Dictionary of Jewish Names and Their Origins is one of the more informative) but What's in a Surname? is different. There are the usual lists. In the appendices McKie tells us the 50 most popular names in England and such like. But the appeal of McKie's approach is his wandering chapters with titles like "Translocations - Names on the March," and "Deprivations - Surnames Lost, Stolen, Strayed - or Denied."

The book is apparently not to be published in paper in the US until mid-September, but it's available on the Kindle right now, which is how I happened to be reading a book on the day it was published.

(And I have it on the best authority that Featherstonhaugh is pronounced Fanshaw.)

Related articles

Is your name Crakpot, Halfenaked or Swetinbedde? New book reveals the UK¿s most bizarre surnames

Manson by Jeff Guinn

Anyone who was old enough to watch TV in the late 1960s will recognize the hippies, Weathermen, SDS, Black Panthers and other lowlifes who inhabit this unusually thorough biography of Charles Manson, the man who programmed 20-some young women to obey his every command, including murdering people, and dying for him if necessary. Xan Brooks in The Guardian describes him as: " . . . a career criminal, one-part pimp to one-part imp; the bespoke vermin of the American counterculture. He crawled inside and built a nest."

Until now Vincent Bugliosi's book about the crime and trials, Helter Skelter, has been the most comprehensive description of the Sharon Tate-La Bianca murders of 1969. And that is still the place to go for the story of the trial and Bugliosi's part in it as an LA assistant district attorney. But now we have Jeff Guinn's Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson.

Guinn's book gives us much more detail about Manson's youth (he was incorrigible at age 5, wielding a sharpened scythe in an attempt to attack a cousin.) The author has interviewed many people who were involved with Manson and much information has come to light since Helter Skelter was published in 1974. Guinn is able to describe in detail life as a member of Manson's "Family," including the indoctrination, LSD, sex, misogyny, demand for total and unthinking obedience to Manson (who claimed at times to be Jesus), and the horrific results of the man's psychopathic mania.

Helter Skelter was a song on the Beatles' White Album and Manson convinced his cult followers that it was a message from the rock band to him and to them. He taught them that blacks in America were going to start a world-wide riot which would kill all white people that he called Helter Skelter. Afterwards Charlie and his Family would rule the world. When Helter Skelter didn't begin soon enough, Manson decided to kill some people and set the murder scene to convince blacks to begin Helter Skelter.

To understand this is impossible, but to get an inkling of why it worked Guinn describes the late 1960s: Haight Ashbury in San Francisco, the Summer of Love, Woodstock, the People's Park in Berkeley, the riots of leftists at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago, the shootings at Kent State, the riots that leveled black neighborhoods in many US cities, the weekly (at times almost daily) bombings by disaffected young people in SDS and the Weathermen.

The Los Angeles police were not very sophisticated about crime scene investigation at that time. A young boy found a .22 caliber Hi Standard Longhorn with a missing right hand grip near the site of one of the crimes and turned it in to the LAPD Valley Services Division.

" . . . based on the broken pieces of a handgrip found at the Cielo (Tate) murder site, the Tate investigators sent out a series of flyers to law enforcement officials asking for information on any .22 Hi Standard Longhorn revolver that might have been recently discovered or turned in. In all they sent some three hundred, including to police officials as far away as Canada. But they failed to send a notice to the Valley Services Division in Van Nuys."

The police were simply unable to see that the two murders were related. One Sunday about a month after the Tate and La Bianca crimes,

" . . . the [LA] Times local news section led with a retrospective: 'Anatomy of a Mass Murder in Hollywood.' Far less prominent was a one-column article, 'La Bianca Couple, Victims of Slayer, Given Final Rites.' An even smaller story told readers that "Police Raid Ranch, Arrest 26 Suspects in Auto-Theft Ring.' Unwittingly, the Times had the seven victims and their killers together on the same page."

But still no one made the connection. Admittedly, the police were overwhelmed with work, the homicide rate having risen 9% between 1968 and 1969.

Guinn's book is extraordinary reading.

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Still Crazy After All These Years?: Charles Manson and Me

Mopup

This summer has been a little unusual in that I've been reading a lot of newly published literary fiction. This is an attempt to evaluate books that might be on our Sweet Sixteen list for next March's Buff Orpington Book Tournament. It's been rewarding. If I weren't focusing on new books I might have missed Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians, Roxana Robinson's Sparta, and Wily Cash's A Place More Kind than Home. But it took a lot of time and focus and I'm now feeling a pent-up demand for stories that require less concentration and for a few murder mysteries.

I have read some other books recently that I haven't reported on. The Lorimer Line by Anne Melville, for example. This is the first of six Lorimer novels by Anne Melville. The Lorimer stories have recently been republished by Bloomsbury Reader, in paperback and e-book formats. The Kindle editions are less than $10. Anne Melville is a pseudonym for Margaret Potter (other pseudonyms are Ann Betteridge and Margaret Evans.) Her father was novelist Bernard Newman, whose best-known book was Spy, published in 1935.

Melville (who was George Eliot's great-grandniece) wrote 55 novels, some of them mysteries and some of them for children.  Originally published between 1977 and 1984 the Lorimer books are a family saga beginning in the early 19th century. This first book begins in 1877 and is about the daughter of the very wealthy Lorimer of the day and her love for her father's young employee who is beneath her on the social scale. Will their love win out despite the antagonism of her family and the unsettling events in the commercial world of the time? (You might be surprised.) I heard about this book from Elaine's blog, Random Jottings.

Another book I wedged in between the more serious books is Margaret Moran's Storm Track, the seventh mystery featuring Moran's Judge Deborah Knott. This series began with The Bootlegger's Daughter, which swept the mystery prizes in 1992. My friends and I have been delighted to find that each Deborah Knott book is better than the last.

Storm Track is about the unlikely arrival in Colleton County, an inland fictional county very near Durham, of a hurricane. The body of a local woman is found dead in a motel not far from the ball field where much of the town was playing or watching baseball games the night she was killed. The investigation that follows digs into the lives of people close to Deborah, all of whom have reason to want the woman dead.

Much of the appeal of these books is Deborah's family. She has umpteen brothers, most of them married, most of them with children, which means she is related to, knows well, or has worked with all of the suspects and most of the characters in the book. Again the rural Carolina setting and especially the food are tremendously appealing.

I zipped through Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane, a moderately interesting book about a man who returns to the neighborhood where he lived as a boy and remembers the goings-on of a singular summer in his youth. Some of the characters have unusual powers and not all of these people are benign. Not my kind of book but it seems very popular with its particular audience.

This Town by Mark Leibovich is an insider's view of political Washington, DC. The author writes for The New York Times and formerly was on the staff of The Washington Post. He knows everybody and has witnessed everything in the last couple of decades and he dishes the dirt. Leibovich has favorites (Andrea Mitchell) and villains (Hilary Clinton) and he does have insight into how life is lived inside the bubble and how the relationships between politicians, lobbyists, and the press make the city a swamp figuratively as well as literally

Art Deco Autos

This is a 1936 Delahaye from a car show in Nashville. I want one.

The Last Summer of the Camperdowns by Elizabeth Kelly

The Last Summer of the Camperdowns by Elizabeth Kelly and Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan were the last books I borrowed from the library as I read my way through a couple of dozen new releases in anticipation of the Buff Orpington Tournament. I was going to just look them over and send them back, but I got caught up in the stories and in the case of The Camperdowns the mystery.

The Camperdowns consist of Camp, the father; Greer, the mother; and Riddle James, the daughter (named after James Riddle Hoffa - these people are serious lefties.) They are spending their summer at the family estate in Wellfleet, on Cape Cod.

Also spending the summer are their neighbor, Gin, who has the creepiest servant since Mrs Danvers, and the Devlins: Michael, a childhood friend and World War II buddy of Camp; Harry, his oldest son, a hottie as we would say now; and younger son, Charlie, whom we don't get to meet because he disappears early in the story.

Camp is running for office so he can't afford any leaks of family secrets, which is deeply unfortunate as this is a summer of leaks. Lots of buried stories are unearthed, some of them true and others not. And Riddle, who narrates the story, which took place in 1972 when she was 12, learns some things she should not and then makes things worse for herself - and others - because she doesn't tell anybody the horrifying thing she saw in the barn.

Even with constant leaks throughout the book there are plenty of secrets to come out in the bang-up ending of this very readable novel.

Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan

Kevin Kwan's delightful first novel about the rich Chinese in Singapore is what I think they call a romp. I don't used the word "read" as a noun, but if I did, this is the book I'd call "a fun read." It's filled with over-the-top women who think nothing of flying from Singapore to a resort in Indonesia for the weekend and men who fly to Hong Kong for dinner. That's how rich they are. Really rich. Crazy rich. For them $40 million on a wedding is about average.

You've heard of JAPs - Jewish American Princesses. This is a book about an ABC, an American Born Chinese girl, Rachel, who teaches economics at NYU and dates a fellow professor, Nicholas. He is from Singapore and he invites her to go there with him for his best friend's wedding and to meet his parents.

The story is peopled with his family, who are distraught because he appears to be about to propose to this girl who is in no way acceptable to the Singapore Chinese for whom Taiwanese Chinese are way too declasse to marry into their patrician bloodline. Then there are the young women who hope to marry Nicholas, vicious backbiters and not above the occasional not-funny practical joke at Rachel's expense.

There are a hundred smile-inducing lines in this novel, too many to quote, but my favorite is, I think, a discussion of how boring somebody's parties are: "Last time we had to sit through an entire piano recital by that Ling Ling guy." Or this indication of the restraint as exhibited by these women: "Her daughter had grown up as one of these people - people of breeding and taste. There wasn't a single diamond over fifteen carats in this crowd." But to Rachel they "made Upper East Side girls look like Mennonites."

You get the picture. Fun, fun, fun.

Top Ten Books in a Favorite Setting

Top Ten Tuesday is a feature created at The Broke and the Bookish blog. Each week they post a new list for bloggers. Click on the logo to see the lists coming up and those posted in the past. This week, as is so often the case, I'm a day late with my Top Ten Books in a Favorite Setting post.

The setting I've chosen in California. First fiction:

1. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West
2. LA Confidential or any other mystery by James Ellroy
3. The Case of the Terrified Typist or any mystery by Erle Stanley Gardner
4. The Cookbook Collector by Allegra Goodman
5. A Is for Alibi or any Kinsey Milhone mystery by Sue Grafton
6. The Human Comedy by William Saroyan
7. The Big Sleep or any other mystery by Raymond Chandler
8. Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon
9. Bullet for a Star or any Toby Peters mystery by Stuart Kaminsky
10. I Dreamed I Married Perry Mason or any Cece Caruso mystery by Susan Kandel

And then nonfiction:

1. Assembling California by John McPhee
2. Hollywood Babylon by Kenneth Anger
3. Helter, Skelter by Vincent Bugliosi
4. Kevin Starr's 8-volume history of California, beginning with Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915
5. Southern California: An Island on the Land by Carey McWilliams
6. Bambi vs Godzilla by David Mamet
7. Mexifornia by Victor Davis Hanson
8. The Genius of the System by Thomas Schatz
9. The Big Screen by David Thomson
10. Star Machine, Jeanine Basinger

Laughter on the Stairs by Beverley Nichols

I read about Beverley Nichols in a blog post at Ciao Domenica, Books that Sparkle. Domenica lists some books that make her world a little brighter for her having read them and since I had read all but two of the books on the list and liked them very much (The Code of the Woosters, Gaudy Night, A Room with a View, Excellent Women) I decided I needed to look into William Boyd's Any Human Heart and something by Nichols.

During his lifetime (1898-1983), Nichols wrote some 60 books and plays -- novels, mysteries, short stories, essays, autobiography, children's books, books on travel, politics, religion, cats, and parapsychology. My library still had a copy of Laughter on the Stairs, published in the US in 1954, one of a trilogy of books about a Georgian house the author bought and renovated in Surrey, called Merry Hall in the books.

Nichols' narrative voice is delightful. Here he is on geraniums:

. . . throughout the whole year there are geraniums, which to me are a sort of "test flower," for long experience has taught me that people who do not like geraniums have something mentally unsound about them. Sooner or later you will find them out; you will discover that they drink, or steal books, or speak sharply to cats.

Nichols is devoted to his cats, One and Five (best perhaps not to ask about what might have happened to Two, Three, and Four.) The descriptions of his recalcitrant but talented gardener and his long-time butler, Gavins, verge occasionally on the hilarious.

His neighbors, mostly ageing spinsters, are a delight. But he sometimes doesn't know quite what to say to them when they ask what he has been writing. "I can never think of anything to say except 'a book' -- an answer which may be true but can hardly be described as a riposte."

Nichols spends a good deal of time and money on his gardens but his house goes pretty much unfurnished. His description of a gift that finally pushed him to buy some furniture is charming.

If one were to say that one's life had been radically changed by a set of walnut chairs, the statement might seem precious. It is the sort of thing that aesthetes used to say in the nineties. That does not worry me much. There were many periods in history which were less worthy, in almost every respect, than the eighteen-nineties, and one of them, in my humble opinion, is the nineteen-fifties.

Here he is describing a walk in his orchard to see the spindles (Euonymus):

After the spindles were the thorns, one of which had gone slightly mad, and produced quite the wrong sort of leaf below the graft. (Trees, I am sure, can lose their reason, just as much as human beings. I have several insane silver birches, to which I am greatly attached, and a half-witted hamamelis mollis . . .)

He is a bit philosophical about ruts:

Why this passion for shaking people out of ruts? I am devoted to ruts. Moreover, most of the people who are in ruts are much nicer, and much happier, than the people who are not. To speak of ruts as though they were undesirable is the sign of a coarse and callow mind. Ruts are the wise old wrinkles that civilization has traced on the earth's ancient face.

Laughter on the Stairs (1953) is the second book of a trilogy about Nichols' house in Surry. The others are Merry Hall (1951) and Sunlight on the Lawn (1956.)

Tea

Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? I am glad I was not born before tea. -- Sydney Smith

Spotted on Lyn's blog, I Prefer Reading

 

Top Ten Beginnings - The Titles

 

The obvious:

1. Moby Dick
2.  Bulwer Litton’s Paul Clifford
3. Little Women
4. David Copperfield
5. Pride and Prejudice
6. A Tale of Two Cities
7. Mrs Dalloway
8. Anna Karenina
9. Swann’s Way
10. The Warden

Less well known:

1. Gulliver’s Travels
2. The Portrait of Dorian Grey
3. Jane Eyre
4. Cry, the Beloved Country
5. The Innocence of Father Brown
6. S E Hinton's The Outsiders
7. Anita Brookner's A Start in Life
8. Zuleika Dobson
9. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
10. Tristram Shandy