There’s a hot thread going on over in the pit about Ben Affleck, J-Lo and race and class (or lack of either).
But I wonder now, where does Ben come from? The name Affleck doesn’t ring a bell, is he Italian or what?
I mean, in a link given in the article he described himself as “white”, but he definately looks Mediterranean (at least a little - not Anglo-Saxony).
South Boston, Irish-Catholic, I believe.
“Affleck” sure doesn’t sound Irish to me. What’s his birth name?
According to imdb, mother is Irish, father is Scots.
StG
If - and this is a bif if, his real surname is Affleck, then it is an old British name, presumably from the North of Britain - Northern England or Scotland - originally spelled Aughtinlech, but pronounced Affleck
It is like those other surnames :
Featherstonehaugh - pronounced Fanshaw
Cholmondely - pronounced Chumly
Menzies - pronounced Mingis?
When the man at Staten Island immigration heard names which sounded foreign to his ears, he wrote down how he thought they were pronounced.
This same law applies to many Amercan names as they are spelled today, regardless of the spelling of the name as the original person had it- Italian, Irish, British, Polish, German, etc. The way your new American name was spelled when you arrived in the New World was largely dependent on the way the immigration man spelled it and that was, in turn a direct result of his own ethnicity and origin.
this page might help you:
Ben’s ancestors all come from a small town in southern Ireland know as “Suckville.” Despite his American upbringing, he is fluent in sucking.
So Affleck is is real surname?
[hijack]
I was going to ask about this actually. I remember reading it years and years ago, and for some reason I just remembered it a couple of weeks ago.
It has NEVER made any sense to me. I had actually put it down to lack of fact checking in the book I was reading (it was a facts book for kids).
How on earth does Featherstonehaugh become Fanshaw?
[/hijack]
[sub]P.S. I was sorely tempted to use [/byejack], but I realized that would make me suck.[/sub]
Why would someone choose that as a stage name?!? It sounds like smoker’s hack.
I have often wondered about that, myself.
Either it is because the name is an upper class name of old and in the upper echelons of society the speakers had so many plums in their mouths as to render comprehension by the masses an impossibility.
Or
It is yet another example of the bizarre pronunciations we routinely use for many English words, without batting an eyelid.
The way we say though, cough, epitome, February, knot, Wednesday, eye etc, etc, etc is not according to the English phonetics of the letters used to spell these words. We pronounce them based on how we have heard them said by others.
The Featherstonehaugh/Fanshaw divide might just be another case of this, but it seems really odd because it is not every day you have to write to Mr F.