Dickheads know that Philip K. Dick translates to “Horselover Fat”: Dick translated his first and last names, obviously tracing “Philip” back to the Greek Philippos and analyzing it (and I make no claims as to the accuracy of this analysis) as phil hippos, or “lover of horses”/“horse lover”, and Dick is just the German word for “fat”; he then used that in some of his fiction as a character name.
What happens when you do that to your name? It could be real or your username. I’ll use my real name.
My first name is, by some amazing coincidence, also Greek: Christopher. It’s from St. Christopher, a dog-headed God-toter who also never existed. It breaks down to Christos phoros, or “Christ-bearer” / “Christ-carrier”, much the same way Lucifer is luci phoros or “light-bearer” and so on.
My last name is, by some amazing coincidence, also German, and it is… not Dick. It’s also not easy to track down. On Ancestry.com, it suggests that the spelling my German ancestors probably used translates to something like “short and stocky like a tree stump”, so I’ll go with that.
So. I’m Christcarrier Stumpy. Pleased to meet you.
Funny story, one day I was perusing a dictionary that had a threadbare cover when I happened to turn to a certain page in the back. There, in my dad’s lettering, in pencil, was my full name at the top of the list of boy’s names. A few pages further, at the top of the list of girl’s names was another name.
My surname is kind of a mundane portmanteau. Interpreting the name of the baby girl that was not me, I get
Chaya means “life” in Hebrew, with an ending tacked on to make in feminine.
Rivkah is older than Hebrew, although the oldest recorded occurrence of it is in the Torah. Rivkah was the wife of Isaac. The name seems to mean “attractive,” but in the sense of “fit for a purpose.” It also may mean to “tie or bind.” The theory is that it originally meant to bind a sacrifice, and then it came to mean fit for sacrifice, and finally “good,” or “healthy,” in the sense that an animal that was chosen for sacrifice was usually the best of the lot.
Rivkah was chosen as a wife for Isaac because she was the best woman that Avraham’s servant found when charged with finding a wife for Isaac, so the name seems already to have meant “Most attractive of the lot,” or something by the time the story was committed to writing. Interestingly, Isaac was the child who had once been bound for sacrifice, so having a wife whose name once meant that, but the name had been transformed was sort of b’shert.
Rivkah is the same name as Rebecca, or Rebekah. The vowels are just placed differently, and the B/V is expressed differently. Probably, the central “V” is correct, but no one really knows for certain. The voweling of Rivkah is certainly the correct Hebrew, but like I said, the name is actually older than Hebrew.
So my name means something like “Most attractive of life – War hammer.”
My first name is Norse, or early modern Norwegian on a Norse pattern. Interpreting it as original Norse it means Bear-Warrior or Bear-Protector (with bear of course being the old Germanic euphemism “the brown one”).
My last name is from a small tenant farm and can be interpreted as “(The place with) the (presumably old) house foundations”.
So I’m the bear-like warrior from the place where there used to be buildings.
