A month or so ago, my daughter (now a precocious/bitterly sarcastic twelve) and I were talking about names and how they develop. I told her that someone of English descent who is named Smith, for instance, likely had a relative who was the town blacksmith. A lot of similar names (Baker, Taylor, Carpenter) were probably ultimately decided on by wayward census takers of the Middle Ages. They were simply desperate for ways to distinguish between the four Jonathans in this hamlet, so decisions were made...and future generations have had to live with the original census taker's lack of creativity.
Our last name is DuBose. I further informed my daughter that, while our family is (as far as we can tell) descended from Norman stock (French Vikings!), the name is from French. It roughly translates to "of the woods," so our ancestors probably had something to do with lumber...or foraging...or, hell, maybe they were just poachers. My daughter took this with good graces, particularly as she is the exact opposite of an outdoors enthusiast.
Today, she informed me that she was really bored, so she googled her first name. "Sylvia means 'wood' or 'forest,'" she informed me, "so you basically named me wood of the wood! It's too much wood!"
"You know what that means?"
"...whaaattt???," she asked, naturally suspicious of her father.
"That means we're going to have to make sure that, once you're on summer break, we take a lot more trips to parks. We've got to get you reintroduced to nature!"
"...um, no."
"What? Don't you want to get to the root of your name?"
Evil stare.
"Get it? Root? Root?"
She then shut her door in my face.
