[64/366] Holly Cosmo
Mar. 4th, 2020 07:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguist5 It’s Learn What Your Name Means Day. So, what does your name mean? Do you think it fits you?
Yay, I love onomastics! My first paper for the "Grammar & Language" class I took as part of my ill-fated English degree, the class that eventually set me on the path to being a linguistics nerd and now a lingustics student, was on the onomastics of my names.
Onomastics basically means the etymology of a name, the things people look up/worry about sometimes when they're going to name a baby (or themselves).
My first name has the most boring onomastics though, because it's already an English word, and you know what it means. It means Christmas was a lot of fun as a kid, when other kids would point to the berries and leaves we made of construction paper, and our teachers taped to the walls, and say "look, you're hanging on the wall!" and then they discovered the old hokey song "Holly Jolly Christmas"...
Anyway, yes, I am a spiky poisonous plant.
The onomastics paper taught me that my middle name and surname are both major-European-language versions of biblical names; one means "gift of god" and the other's someting else "of god," if I recall.
Cosmo, of course, comes from Greek κόσμος, kosmos, and is understood to mean something like "order" -- cosmos is opposed to chaos, which is why it came to be associated with space on the grand scale of the universe by scientists who were amazed at how orderly and rule-bound it was turning out to be.
When I was still considering Cosmo a joke name I said my friends would laugh if I picked a name that meant "order and decency." But really, I've always been one to fight against the forces of entropy, to oragnize, to create things that otherwise would never exist, to resist the natural deterioration of everything as much as I can. It's not why I picked the name, but it's not a bad meaning.
--
In other news, I have picked a text for that essay I was talking about yesterday. An internet friend of mine does an e-mail newsletter reviewing Lifetime movies, and they're funny and great but also just the kind of "speech-like" writing (i.e. "sounds like it's from the internet") that'll suit the framework I am going to analyze the language with. My friend is delighted that I want to do this and I think she's being a good sport.
Yay, I love onomastics! My first paper for the "Grammar & Language" class I took as part of my ill-fated English degree, the class that eventually set me on the path to being a linguistics nerd and now a lingustics student, was on the onomastics of my names.
Onomastics basically means the etymology of a name, the things people look up/worry about sometimes when they're going to name a baby (or themselves).
My first name has the most boring onomastics though, because it's already an English word, and you know what it means. It means Christmas was a lot of fun as a kid, when other kids would point to the berries and leaves we made of construction paper, and our teachers taped to the walls, and say "look, you're hanging on the wall!" and then they discovered the old hokey song "Holly Jolly Christmas"...
Anyway, yes, I am a spiky poisonous plant.
The onomastics paper taught me that my middle name and surname are both major-European-language versions of biblical names; one means "gift of god" and the other's someting else "of god," if I recall.
Cosmo, of course, comes from Greek κόσμος, kosmos, and is understood to mean something like "order" -- cosmos is opposed to chaos, which is why it came to be associated with space on the grand scale of the universe by scientists who were amazed at how orderly and rule-bound it was turning out to be.
When I was still considering Cosmo a joke name I said my friends would laugh if I picked a name that meant "order and decency." But really, I've always been one to fight against the forces of entropy, to oragnize, to create things that otherwise would never exist, to resist the natural deterioration of everything as much as I can. It's not why I picked the name, but it's not a bad meaning.
--
In other news, I have picked a text for that essay I was talking about yesterday. An internet friend of mine does an e-mail newsletter reviewing Lifetime movies, and they're funny and great but also just the kind of "speech-like" writing (i.e. "sounds like it's from the internet") that'll suit the framework I am going to analyze the language with. My friend is delighted that I want to do this and I think she's being a good sport.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-04 07:50 pm (UTC)I often think about it now- that my current name doesn’t have ‘a meaning’ and that’s odd because I liked the meaning of my birth name, which wouldn’t be nearly so gendered if I was American and I’d probably have kept it!
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Date: 2020-03-04 07:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2020-03-05 12:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-06 12:25 pm (UTC)I don't think that suits me at all - it's much more like Richard I ("the Lionheart"), which really isn't my character. But I like the sound of the name so I've chosen to keep it.
Charles, the name that my nan tried to impose on me, is from German Karl via Latin carolus, and is a diminutive ultimately of Proto-Indo-European *ǵerh₂- (which means "old man"), so "young man".
George, my actual middle name, is from Greek Γεώργιος (Georgios), and means "farmer".
So no, none of them feel especially close to me in meaning. But that's fine, I like the family story that comes with Richard, and I like the sound of the name.
(no subject)
Date: 2020-03-09 04:18 pm (UTC)I'm a not-spiky but poisonous plant!