Re: [OT] Family names (Wieser)

From: Beth (BethStone21_at_hotmail.NOSPICEDHAM.com)
Date: 02/17/04 

Date: Tue, 17 Feb 2004 09:59:03 -0000

T.M. Sommers wrote:
> Beth wrote:
> > Also, names like "McDonald" actually means "son of Donald"
(Scottish
> > way)
>
> The 'Scottish way' is 'MacDonald'.

As a McDonald themselves has now told you, this is merely a spelling
alternative (remembering that, at this time, there was no "standard"
spellings...like Shakespeare's "MacBeth" (oh dear, Wannabee's going to
find that funny...I can tell ;) yet Mr.Shaekspeer himself spelt his
own name in dozens of different ways :)...

But it is a common "urban myth" that "Mc" is Irish and "Mac" is
Scottish, which isn't actually true...just spelling variations of the
same thing...note, also, that in the original Scottish Gaelic the "c"
sound is actually like "ch" in "loch" or German "Ach" (a throaty sound
:)...the Welsh and Irish (and the Scots but not so much) still keep
their Celtic tongues alive and it's interesting to compare that the
Welsh word for "son" is "mab", which is close to "mac"...though the
languages have separated out over time, there's still many words
similar and common between them (such as the one mentioned below)...

> > or "O'Reilly" is "(son / daughter) of Reilly"
>
> The feminine form is 'na' or 'ni', I forget which, or maybe both.

"Na" would be my guess from the Irish mythical place name: "Tir Na
Nog" which means "Land of Eternal Youth" and "tir" means "land" in
both Welsh and Irish Gaelic (remembering that, long ago, Welsh, Irish
Gaelic, Scottish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic were really all one
language...I also noticed - when researching up where the computing
term "bug" might come from (because it's actually a very old word:
Shakespeare used it in one of his plays!! And it was "old" even then
;) - that Manx Gaelic and Welsh have another common word "bwgan" (said
something like "boo-gah-nn") which is like a ghost or spirit or
presence...this is also where "bogeyman" comes from too...and, before
computers, "bug" was commonly used in electrical engineering (the term
was most probably borrowed directly, due to the ancestry of how
electrical engineering gradually turned into computing as it got more
complicated ;)...and it goes further back to Shakespeare's time when
he uses "bug" in the "I've caught an illness" kind of way ("I think
I've caught a bug")...and seems to go right back to this Celtic word
for ghost or spirit...so, "bug" doesn't actually relate to insects, as
is commonly believed (because, yup, "bug" is also a word for
insect...must check if this is "coincidence" or that word comes from
the same origin ;) but actually is about ghosts and malicious spirits
and that kind of thing...hence, "I've caught a bug" actually refers to
being possessed of an evil spirit making you ill (which was a commonly
held belief in the Dark Ages that all illness was to do with "evil
spirits" controlling people and they even had a charming medical
procedure which involved trepanning - that is, drilling a big hole in
someone's head(!!) - as a kind of way of "releasing" the evil spirit
out of a person's body...and when you're program has "bugs", this is
actually similar to saying "there's gremlins in the machine"...like
there's a malicious "ghost in the machine" that's making things go all
wrong :)...

Of course, the names always pass down the male side of the family so,
in fact, be it "na" or "ni" it would never actually be used as a
family name...which is why there's no "NaReilly" names to be found
anywhere...you kind of got the wrong end of the stick because I kind
of meant "if you're name is O'Reilly then this means you're a great,
great, great, etc. grandson / granddaughter of someone who was called
Reilly" at that point...

Also, it would be interesting to find out if it's _really_ "na"
because, of course, the Romans put things like "-na" or "-ia" or "-a"
at the end of names to signify femininity..."Claudius" vs.
"Claudia"..."Victor(ius)" vs. "Victoria"...the Romans, of course, used
Latin where gender, number and pronouns were not separate but implied
by suffixes throughout, such as "Video" meaning "I see" (the "-(e)o"
ending being first-person "I" in the present tense...like "Audio" (I
hear) too...becoming "-i" in the past tense for things like "Veni,
Vidi, Vici" (I came, I saw, I conquered)...note "vidi" for "I saw" but
"Video" for "I see"...and how "Vic-" in conquer / conquered is also
the start of "Victor", which still has the meaning of "winner" or,
more rightly, "conquerer" :)...hence, really, with Latin names, the
"-ius" or "-ia" is strictly a _grammatical thing_ applied onto a name
rather than part of the name itself...many people - even the odd
historian - forgets this when looking back on names from Roman or
post-Roman periods...and, certainly, the old Celtic languages were
"Romanised" when Britain was conquered by the Romans...so, one wonders
how much is actually "original" and how much came about through
"influence"...which isn't a strange idea at all because guess what
we're speaking when we're speaking English? Basically, an _entire
language_ that was born that way...a mish-mash patchwork quilt of a
language that came about as a "common tongue" between all the
different peoples of Britain at the time, who all spoke different
things: Anglo-Saxons with a Germanic edge, French was there, some
Viking stuff, the Celts (and though the Celts of Britain like to
sometimes think they were the "originals" on this small island, they
were _invaders_ too...just the oldest ones we actually know anything
about...Stonehenge isn't actually Celtic...it's _OLDER_ than
that...because those stones are actually older than the Pyramids of
Giza, amazingly...quite funny, really, the English steal King Arthur
as "the King of England" but England didn't even exist at the time so
he _must_ have been Celtic...and the Celts like to think of Stonehenge
as "theirs" - getting annoyed it's now in England when it's "theirs" -
but, actually, it's older than that still so if the Celts feel it's
"theirs" then they are stealing the credit there too...so, it's
actually a touch _inaccurate_ for those mad people who dress up as
"druids" to go to Stonehenge, thinking they are enacting some ritual
from the past because "druids" were Celtic but Stonehenge is even
older still...it's a similar thing to those people today who call
themselves "Wicca" and suggest they are copying the old ways of
"witches" when half of the stuff they do in rituals and so forth are
actually known to be historically inaccurate...basically, someone
liked the idea of being a "Wicca" and "retro-invented" some history
for it, which is actually a _modern_ invention but so few people know
enough history they actually think all that stuff is "carrying on an
ancient tradition" when it isn't really...

It's amazing how much "retro-inventing" actually happens in
history...there was actually a TV programme on today - hosted by none
other than Terry Jones of Monty Python fame (he has other interests in
history as well as being a comedian...that's actually why Monty Python
did that "Jabbawocky" film, as it was his idea to actually do a film
set in the past so he could combine both his interests at the same
time :) - where Terry Jones is actually doing a series of programmes
"correcting" all the misconceptions people have of the past...

For example, in medieval times, people didn't live as long? I bet
you've all been told this...but it's actually a
_misunderstanding_...the "average life expectancy" was shorter, yes,
because more people died in childbirth or got childhood diseases (not
as good medicine back then :)...but if you survived that, then you
actually stood a pretty good chance of living just as long as today to
a ripe old age...the misunderstanding, of course, is that an "average"
is NOT an actual age...all the zero years and one year old and two
year old deaths in childhood are actually dragging the "average" down
there...if you didn't die at that point, though, people actually lived
to rather respectable ages...

Pure virginal "damsels in distress"? Totally invented nonsense...it
was actually a _Victorian_ idea that women should be "kept" away from
doing work or whatever...the _Victorians_ invented this idea because
being rich and socially acceptable was a big thing at the time...so,
this oppression of women stuff stems from _them_, not the distant
past...the idea the Victorians had basically worked like this: If you
were poor then you needed all the money you could get so _both_ the
man and woman worked to scrape a living...well, the rich people wanted
to show just how rich they were and the women would stay at home, as
if to say "look, we're so rich that only one of us needs to do
work"...the original "trophe wives", basically...if you go back
further in the past, then you see Boudicea leading troops into battle,
prostitution everywhere and so forth...in fact, in medieval times,
women were considered in much the _opposite_ way...as being the
"sexual" ones and the stereotype was reversed that it was women who
were always thinking and wanting sex, annoying the men with this all
the time who had battles and work and things to be doing...plus,
sorry, but the women did work just as much as the men...the only kinds
of exceptions to this was a practical thing...women have the children
so, yeah, for _practical_ reasons of making sure the next generation
actually gets born, you don't put a pregnant woman into
battle..."Women's Lib" and femininism is actually just women
re-asserting their position they had before this Victorian "social
class" nonsense got in the way...

People were stupider in the past? Total nonsense again...this is a
distortion of Darwinism (actually, not really...because that's one of
the big components here: Darwin _himself_ got it wrong and he actually
supported ideas like the "Poor Law" as a kind of "survival of the
fittest" between rich and poor, actually believing that poor people
were "lesser"...he also had contempt for the "natives" he met on his
Beagle voyage as being "lesser" too...the point to remember here is
that Darwin discovered the process of evolution but had not a clue
about the _mechanism_ of evolution - genes and DNA - so, to him, if he
observed poor people, he wasn't thinking in "genetic" terms but just
in terms of "oh, look, they aren't doing as well as me...this must be
just like those birds I saw on the islands where the 'lesser' ones
died off because they had shorter beaks")...we _know_ the mechanism by
which these things work: genetics...and this _has not changed_ since
the first "Homo Sapiens"...another common misconception is that
evolution is "gradual"...not at all! Things actually carry on much the
same until there's "mutation" and it actually works in "jumps", like a
very shallow staircase if plotted on a graph...

Of course, in the past, there was less _knowledge_...for example,
medieval people didn't watch TV...but this wasn't because they were
"stupid" but because, to make a cathode ray tube and broadcast TV, you
need: electricity, atomic theory (a cathode ray tube is basically an
electron gun so you need to know about electrons to work out why you
need to make a "gun" for them ;), glass-making of good quality, how to
create a vacuum, magnetism (to go along with your atomic theory, to
"bend" the paths of the electrons to hit different parts of the
phospor to light up the picture :), data storage, radio waves (if
broadcasting via a normal aerial :), etc., etc....there's an awful lot
of technologies and knowledge that had to be _invented first_ before a
TV was possible...the technologies all depend on one another so you
couldn't really do any of this stuff "out of order"...

They weren't "stupider" - if you could travel in time then you'd find
them roughly as _intelligent_ as people today, just they wouldn't have
the same _knowledge_ about electricity, physics and all the rest of
it - and proof of this was Leonardo Da Vinci, an exceptional thinker
way ahead of his time, who worked out aerodynamics (while others still
weren't sure what wind was...Leonardo had the "Faith" to realise that
there was actually something there - air - but you just can't see it
directly ;) and, from that, invented parachutes (tested recently and
worked perfectly...it, in fact, stunned the parachutist who tested it
in just how good it was, comparing favourably to modern versions...not
bad for a first attempt that Leonardo could only plan but didn't have
the means to actually test :)...and, of course, was _500 years_ ahead
of the game in inventing a helicopter (the science was correct, it was
only the materials and a bit of "refining" of the design - something
you could only reasonably expect from being able to play around with
the idea pragmatically with actual observation, like the Wright
Brothers themselves had to do 500 years later - that needed to be done
:)...

You do have to be careful of this "retro-invention" of history when
looking back on things...for example, the Romans basically called
_everyone_ "barbarians" regardless...so, though it was a rural rather
than city existence, archeology has uncovered irrigation and mining
that's thousands of years old plus many other things showing that the
Celts of Britain weren't really so "barbarian" as the Romans and then
later the English liked to paint them...indeed, the victors always
write the history books...so, what's the common perception of these
people today? Why, barbaric warriors just chopping people's heads off
all the time..."Braveheart" and all that jazz...doesn't actually fit
much of the picture that _forensic archeology_ has uncovered but,
nevermind, because it gave the Romans and English an excuse to "cull"
their enemies in war by painting them as "lesser" or "animals"...

Which is why we must be very careful with the Iraqi museums and
history being wiped out in looting and patronising talk about
"teaching the Iraqis how to run a police force" or the phrase that
knocked me sideways when, Geoff Hoon - the UK's defence secretary -
actually voiced on a political debate show that the British were
showing the Iraqis how to irrigate and pipe water to their homes in
Basra(!!)...for people who might fall for this propoganda about the
West "teaching" these poor "barbarians" and "animals" how to do these
things, let's just look at the logic that Iraq is basically one big
sandy desert with a few rivers running through it and there's no way
this _cradle of civilisation_ (on the journey from that African valley
to now, humanity passed through that general region and much of the
"civilisation" we now today had origins there...for example, the name
for "0123456789"? The generally curvy nature of the numerals -
compared to the curvy arabic script - should give a clue...they are
the "Arabic numerals" and much of mathematics comes from there...the
Romans didn't have any zero but the arabs taught the Western world
about that stuff :) could have survived for thousands of years if none
of them knew how to distribute water...truth is, _they_ taught _us_
originally...

This is the "re-writing of history" that conquerors always do...much
like all the fuss about WMD before the war - and we were _all_ there
so if your memory is working well, you'll remember that it _wasn't_
any "minor trivial issue" at that time - but it's now trying to be
"brushed over" as "trivial" once they've been found out to have either
1. lied delibrately 2. got their intelligence so wrong, it means they
are incredibly _incompetent_...hence, whatever the truth, they can't
really get away from it...either someone was lying or someone was
grossly incompentent to the tune of all those _tens of thousands_ of
deaths...yes, intelligence can never be perfect...but that's why the
sensible thing is to _resist_ going to war until you're absolutely
100% certain of the conclusions of your intelligence...you certainly
don't go on the word of a single exile with a grudge against
Saddam...I mean, come on, he made it up to get revenge on Saddam!

Nah, the truth here is they either did this _delibrately_ and are
making lies and excuses...or, to give the benefit of the doubt, they
already had plans to go into Iraq (a "known known" because it's on
record that Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz were part of a "PNAC" organisation
about creating an "American empire" in order to basically delibrately
maintain military advantage...as they themselves explain, the Soviets
kept the Americans from "world domination" but now that the Cold War
is over, Rumsfeld's friends have plans to do the old "New Roman
Empire" thing that Mussolini was also all about...ideas like
delibrately attacking a country to keep it "lesser" and "behind"
America - you know, exactly like how Microsoft attacks smaller
companies and makes sure that they never encounter any "threats" by
killing them off before they get too big to deal with - so that
America is always "King of the World"...and this is not
"interpretation" or a big secret, the word "empire" _is_ used by these
PNAC people and Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Jeb Bush _are_ members of
this...so, sure, it's technically "civilian" but if all the people on
this group just so happen to be in positions of power, are we really
suggesting that they won't be tempted to use that power to get their
"agenda"? If there's any doubts about this then it has to be noted
that the PNAC "recommended" a specific defence increase...which,
"coincidentally", was _exactly the sum_ Mr.Walker Bush asked Congress
to grant him recently)...they already had plans to do these things and
we have a case of subconscious self-delusion...that is, they wanted to
kick Saddam's arse so, "coincidentally", all the evidence to support
doing that were things that they saw and anything that suggested
otherwise was something their subconscious minds "blocked out"...so,
basically, they _didn't_ do their jobs properly and let their
prejudiced plans effect their judgements and decisions...and that's
the _polite_ version, presuming they did this _accidentally_...it's
also quite possible that it was completely _conscious_ and not
subconscious...that it was _lying_ rather than simply
_incompetence_...though, either way, these aren't people to have in
power...at worst, they delibrately lied and deceived...at best, they
were massively incompetent and didn't do their jobs properly...NOT
people to have in power, even when we give them the benefit of the
doubt that it wasn't a delibrate thing...

Listening to Tony Blair the other day, I can kind of see where the
problem might come from with him...as is usual here, a "committee" of
MPs interviewed the Prime Minister about policies and practices and
things...and a couple of interesting things were said...Tony pointed
out that he'd _never held any position of power_ prior to being Prime
Minister (he joked: "Hey, this is the only job I've ever done"...in
government, of course, he means...he was a lawyer - a trained liar,
like actors are - prior to this...but no position in the Cabinet or
even as "shadow home secretary" (British terminology there...the
"opposition" to the government - the other main party who didn't win -
also set up their own "shadow" cabinet like the government so that the
"shadow home secretary" deals with the same things as the _actual_
"home secretary" so that they are literally put head-to-head...the
"shadow" versions come up with the opposition party's alternative
policies and put the government to direct scrutiny on their facts and
figures :) when Labour were in opposition)...and there was talk
amongst the MPs about "why are doing things this way? It's not
traditional in this country for the Prime Minister to do
everything...that's a Presidential system, which we don't have"...and
Tony's replies kind of highlighted that he was basically "making it up
as he goes along" because he'd never done any job like this before and
didn't really know how it was done before...so, he was probably
copying the American Presidential system because he had no idea how
the British system is supposed to work differently...or how Tony
suddenly announced _changes to the Constitution_, of all things,
overnight without any consultation and now confesses "okay, that was
done in the wrong way...I made a mistake there"...blah-blah-blah...

In short, Tony was heralded because he was a young Prime
Minister...you know, "Hey, Tony likes the rock band Oasis!" / "Hey,
Tony plays rock 'n roll on his electric guitar!"...the old "he's a
fresh face with new ideas" thing...but on the flip side of this coin
is that he was actually so young and relatively new to the game that
he'd never picked up what exactly a government was supposed to do, how
things traditionally worked and all that stuff...young can, indeed,
mean "fresh" and "new" but it can also mean "brash", "naive",
"inexperienced"...and this kind of describes his Prime Ministership
thus far...always wanting to "reform" practically everything, coming
up with bold new ideas and stuff...some of which, to be fair, weren't
all bad (the House of Lords _does_ need "reform" - that "inheritance"
thing literally is centuries out of date - although I'm not sure that
Tony's actually come up with an idea that's any better than what's
there already)...but there's been an awful lot - especially recently -
of Tony making "dumb mistakes"..."naive" mistakes, really...showing
his inexperience...rushing off convinced that he can just talk to a
couple of other countries and achieve "world peace" single-handedly
overnight...that is, still with youthful exuberance at the idea - hey,
who doesn't want world peace and didn't think it was "easy" when
younger? - but is falling afoul of those political things that have,
indeed, kept it from happening...he's gaining the experience that it
wasn't achieved before because of _problems_ with getting it to work,
not with there not being a consensus all over the world for "World
Peace"...I suppose as long as he doesn't put his foot in it too
badly - though, arguably, he's already done so with Iraq and so
forth - then you can tolerate a bit of "learning on the job" because
even the most experienced need to do a little of that...try things out
to see if, indeed, they work or not...but if he does too much of that
then he could stuff things up big-time...he needs to learn a bit of
mature restraint and not get so "youthfully" excited by everything all
the time...needs to learn about delegating power (number ten at the
moment basically insists on the Prime Minister doing everything, which
isn't actually how it's supposed to work over here...Tony watched too
many American films with the American President who does that kind of
thing and thought the British Prime Minister was supposed to just be a
counterpart to that...but, actually, the system _is_ different, which
is why the "job title" is different...he's just another
"Minister"...the "Prime" or most important one, yes, but just another
"Minister", not a "supreme ruler" or anything ;)...

I guess Bush's excuse is that he's a rich kid so doesn't have much
contact with reality...I mean, certainly no idea of what an average
American experiences because he might not understand that most
Americans don't get given baseball teams and oil companies for free
and, you know, actually have to _do work_ and stuff like that...made
worse when he was an alcoholic that he was completely detached from
_any_ reality for a while and that may have caused some permanent
"slow thinking", which the way he speaks with made-up words and really
slowly kind of supports that hypothesis...he also probably doesn't
understand too many things that when someone tells him to say this or
do that, he just follows along...much like that address he made to the
nation about the "Niger documents" and about "Terrorist links", which
he's later had to retract and blames on his speech writer putting
inaccurate information into the speech (but, just to remind you,
Commander-in-chief, it's still your responsibility to _make sure_ that
what you're told to pass onto the American people is _accurate_...it's
not like you have an excuse...as American President, what you say goes
so if you'd insisted "actually, I want to see the evidence of this",
then they'd have to comply...when addressing the nation about
something so serious as war, you have a duty and responsibility to the
American people to get it 100% right as far as is humanly possible, so
it's _NOT_ good enough to simply say: "Hey, he told me to say it!" and
think that lets you off the hook...you are President and it's _your
job_ to keep things in order and if you say "get me _proof_" / "_show
me_ how this intelligence clearly demonstrates intent", they've _got
to_ do it for you...let me guess, Dubya, you thought this was another
one of those "jobs" where someone else does all the work and you just
sit around watching baseball all day long? ;)...

Beth :)