Name Etymologies

All of these are great fun.

The anglo-saxon name meanings are often plain, or at least so foreign sounding to our ears now that it’s easier to hear them as meaningful: Beowulf is “bee-hunter”, probably; etc.

Hebrew names are the interesting case where they’re so normal in western culture as “oh, a given name” that we often seem completely blind to their meanings. Adam, for example, probably means something like “humanity”, the collective noun. Israel is roughly “wrestles with god”. And Jesus Christ, as famously memed on tumblr, is modernizable as “oily josh”. (and in that form of his name, has already been translated through the greek first anyway!)

“ Aristotle means Best End or Best Purpose, as his name includes the telos that plays such an important role in his philosophy.”

That’s almost too good to be true! Never has a name been more apt. It’s sort of recursive - like the telos of his name was to give rise to the guy who came up with “Telos.”

Along similar lines, in English writings on WWII, I wish we would see "Fuhrer" translated into English, rather than left as-is; it gives a significantly different sense of how the Nazis presented Hitler and how the German people perceived him - not someone with some sort of weird opaque title, but quite literally The Leader.