The Language Log is going on about “locative epithets” and people treating them like names–whether people do it and whether it’s bad form. This all began with the report of one of the other bloggers about Dan Brown’s use of “Da Vinci” as a name, referencing something written by journalist for the New Yorker. (Which means that I’m referencing a reference to a reference to something written by someone else… *crosses eyes*)

Anyhow, the relevant statement (see second link) is this:

“Da Vinci is not a name. It’s a prepositional phrase, like of Nazareth in Jesus of Nazareth. What would Of Nazareth do?”

To which Bill Poser eventually replies (first link):

“In all the foofuraw about the barbarism of referring to Leonardo da Vinci as da Vinci, nobody seems to have noticed that referring to people by their locative epithets alone is quite common.”

(As a side note for people who like quirky words: His “foofuraw” is apparently a mispelling of “foofaraw”, which appears to be a kissing cousin of the more common “brouhaha.” I like “brouhaha” and am glad it has cousins.)

He lists examples:

“(Vincent) van Gogh, (Alexis) de Tocqueville, (James) van Allen, (Johannes Diderik) van der Waals”

Which immediately makes me go, “Whoa, Nelly! Are we sure we know what we’re talking about here?”

There are times when place names associated with people are truly just plain ol’ “locative epithets” (place names that people are called). Example? Sweet Betsy from Pike. (Who, if you didn’t know, crossed the wide prairie with her husband Ike and engaged in several embarassing behaviors on the way.) Jesus of Nazareth is another, as either Pullum or Gopnik notes. And Leonardo da Vinci is another, at least in his lifetime.

There are ALSO occassions when locative epithets (like epithets about one’s parentage or occupation or big ugly head) have become surnames. Want an easy test? If a man moves to another country, gets married, and has kids, and everyone naturally calls the kids by their father’s “epithet” as a surname, it’s not a locative epithet anymore but a honest-to-goodness surname. And guess what? Ol’ Vincet van Gogh was born in Zundert, the son of Theodorus van Gogh. Locative epithet? If that’s what it started as (and I can’t find an origin for it–it *may* not be a place-name at all), it wasn’t by then! Same with Van Allen, which was certainly a locative epithet at some point. And Van der Waals, too. (Apparently, Dutch surnames with “van” are appropriately capitalized that way when the first name isn’t used. In contrast, the Spanish “de” in “de Soto” is appropiately lowercase in all circumstances. Oh, the things we learn!)

Jack London wasn’t born in London, but I’d bet you anything that one of his ancestors was (or pretended to be). All Kents had a progenitor from Kent, the Bristows in Bristow, the Eatons in Eaton, the Salsiburys in, you guessed it, Salsibury. The Washingtons (as in George) were called after the estate they had owned for centuries–if not for a land-deal with a local bigwig in the church back in England many years ago, there’s a very good chance that they would have kept their original estate and our first president might have been George Hartburn instead. (”Hart” is a male deer–specifically a male red deer over 5 years old–while “burn” is just a stream.) It isn’t just English, either. All those Dresdners came from Dresden, and many areas of the world where surnames came relatively late have used place names as well.

Not only that, but often, place names don’t come from an actual town at all. Monteverdi’s family apparently lived on a green mountain at some point. The Ogdens lived in a shady oak vale. “Lea,” “mead(e),” “burn,” “mont,” “ton,” “don,” “vale,” “wich,” “ham,” “hurst,” and many other common elements of names all indicate place origins. And sometimes the locative epithets-to-surnames continue that transformation by becoming first names as well. Like Kent or Lynn or Darcy or Ashley or Courtney…. Or they start out as first names, like Lydia, which is a place in Anatolia. *g* Or Larissa, another city in the Near East. Or parents simply co-opt place names for their kids, as has become fashionable recently–Montana, Savannah, Paris, Sydney, Texas, Dallas, Austin… (And, in an interesting piece of trivia, the current surname of the British royals is Windsor, named after their castle. It was changed in 1917 from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha…for obvious reasons.)

Please note that it’s immaterial whether or not the “of” or “from” is kept in ex-locative-epithet surnames, and that the presence of the “of” in no way implies that it’s still a true locative epithet. Darcy literally means “of Arcy” still. There also are a number of languages that, unlike English, have conserved the “of” element in ex-locative epithets that are now clearly simple surnames and everyone knows it. (Like in Dutch, Van Allen and the rest…) English has been rather peculiar in that locative epithets were never used with “of” historically, and neither were occupational epithets ever used with a definite article. For example, if Will was called “Dyer” because that was his job, he was called “Will Dyer” from the start, not “Will the Dyer,” just a Jane from London was Jane London and John who was pale was John White. Brits still commonly used this construction with occupations when the occupation is clearly NOT a surname but a nickname-identifier (or modern occupational epithet). “Giles Bus Driver” would be how they might identify Giles the bus driver to separate him from, say, the barber named Giles.

Also, it is, I think, critical to note that the “of” doesn’t always idnicate a place at all. Inez Montoya de Gomez is not from a PLACE named Gomez but married to a MAN named Gomez. (This is a social construction now on the decline.) Inez’s legal name (Inez Montoya Giron) is the same as before she married Raul Gomez Acevedo, and their child would be Rosario Gomez Montoya. (An interesting contrast to the da Vinci “faux pas” is the fact that Pablo Ruiz Picasso SHOULD be known as Ruiz or Ruiz Picasso and that calling him Picasso is an error. So much for art historians as experts in naming usage, eh?) “De” in Spanish CAN mean a place, too, though it’s usually part of a longer last name, btw. The “von” in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe appears to be an affectation, as his father was plain Johann Kaspar Goethe. (The “of/von” in German and German-speaking areas usually indicated nobility, and the family of the title-bearers were literally originally OF their barony/county/whatever–but only originally, as I note below.) It appears that “Goethe” was, in fact, nowhere at all. (I have confirmed my suspicion through a Wikipedia article–affectation indeed, though it might be part of his ennoblement in 1782.)

Then there are times that the place-names are actually part of titles of nobility and deserve to be distinguished from true locative epithets because it is common enough that the title-bearer is not literally FROM that region and, when these names could be inherited by non-heirs, could be many generations removed from the region. In most Western countries, it is, in fact, the proper usage to use the place-name as a form of address and not the noble’s family name (if it is different, as it is in most Western Europen countries). Arthur Wellesley, Duke of Wellington was called “Wellington” (comparing “da Vinci” to “duke” in such an instance is nonsensical because “Vinci” is a LOCATION, not a TITLE, as “duke” is) not “Wellesley” by those who might address him so familiarly, and he would have signed himself in informal circumstances as Arthur Wellington after being raised to the title of duke. After Elizabeth I made Robert Dudley Earl of Leicester, she called him Leicester. All of those “Baron (Graf) von Whatevers” in Germany and surrounding countries went by their placenames, which were usually ALSO their surnames, doing double duty that was practically unknown in England by the 1600s. I’ve written in this blog about enjoying reading a number of books by John Julius Norwich–Lord Norwich, that is, whom I properly call “Norwich” and not whatever the heck his surname actually is.

As a note, Bill Poser’s example of Tocqueville is particularly poorly chosen because calling Alexis de Tocqueville by the name of Tocqueville isn’t some oddity of locative epithet usage but a PROPER reference to Alexis Henri Charles de Clérel, vicomte de Tocqueville. Please note, however, that calling him “de Tocqueville” would be an ignorant mistake (which the Wikipedia does NOT commit), just as calling the Duke of Wellington “of Wellington” instead of just “Wellington” would be a mistake and calling Kaspar Maria von Sternberg “von Sternberg” would be wrong. But Van der Walls is correct. (And the marquis Guillaume de l’Hôpital is, correctly, just plain “l’Hôpital,” for all you calculus lovers out there, though Fernando de Soto is “de Soto.”) This is entirely an issue of regional–and sometimes familial!–usage.