TIL (thanks to Andrew Hickey’s podcast) that the 1969 Beach Boys album 20/20 has the distinction of employing the creative input of no less than four convicted murders.
Charles Manson is the uncredited cowriter of “Never Learn Not to Love”
Phil Spector cowrote “I Can Hear Music”
Huddie (Lead Belly) Ledbetter wrote “Cotton Fields”
Jim Gordon was a (Wrecking Crew) session drummer.
So, for once, Mike Love might not be the most evil person on a Beach Boys record….might not.
And so is English - Miller, Baker/Baxter, Butcher, Smith, Wright, Taylor, Carpenter, Joyner.
But I believe there was a time in either Germany or Austria or both when Jews were required to drop patronymics and adopt a family surname, many of which were were derived from their trade.
You make gold-leaf? But I already named someone Goldblatt. So what am I supposed to name you? (Looks out window, sees walnut tree). Guten tag, Herr Nusbaum!
The guide in our recent trip to Vietnam had the family name Nguyen. She explained it was so common there for three reasons:
great thinking … to “rectify” people without last name, you all give them the SAME last name. How is that better? … mon dieux!!!
This article shows six basic surname categories
His autobiography, All By My Selves, is also pretty cool as celebrity bios go.
Today I learned about coffin birth, which is where the corpse of a pregnant woman will expel the (dead) fetus as a result of the decomposition and accumulation of gasses.
It tends to happen in cases where the mother dies and no one is aware of it, such as in the case of a woman who may have been killed and dumped somewhere.
Vatican City = Bachmann … well that’s a Turner for the books, seems like Overdrive to me.
Not surprisingly, that’s a common Swiss name.
I thought it was Canadian
… I found the capital F in your avatar!
(After years of wondering if it had any meaning.)
Looking at a list of the 5000 most common names in the US, it seems a little ironic that the generic “Doe” is 4974th.
“Smith” is my last name. The family historian said our ancestor Ludvig Schmidt came from Germany in the 18th century and Americanized it to Lewis Smith. Of course, maybe the Smiths that were named after their trade reproduced like rabbits. If so, it seems like “Farmer” would be more common.
Farmers were usually not named after their profession since everyone did it. They’d be named after other things like where they lived, a physical feature, or some significant fact of their life.
E.g. Fenwick, for a dairy farmer in a marshy area
Yeah, “Smith” is common as a last name because most every village had one and only one Smith. If there are multiples of a profession, then it’s no good as a last name, because you wouldn’t know which “John Farmer” you were referring to, and if it’s rarer, like barrel-making, then anyone in that profession would be even more likely to bear it as a last name, but there just weren’t as many of them.
Or if you were Robert who lived near the woods, you’d be called “Robert atte wood.” Your son would also be called atte wood if his first name was common and eventually, your family is known as the Atwoods.
And of course there’s the whole phenomenon of patronymics.
And if there were more than one, they would likely be father and son
Yep. Always figured somewhere in the distant past an ancestor lived in an oak forest, was strong as an oak, was as dumb as an oak, had a squirrel runs up his pants leg and steal his nuts, something like that and it stuck.