Re: Off topic: nomen et omen [was Any way to use Xywrite as an E-mail

["Robert Holmgren" holmgren@xxxxxxxx]

** Reply to message from cld@xxxxxxxx (Carl Distefano) on Wed, 5 Mar 2003
00:00:49 -0500


> Well, of course, back when people were named *after* their
> occupations, this sort of thing was unremarkable.

In the Scandinavian branch of my family, "back when" was about 60-70 years ago.
My *father* was part of the first generation to adopt a surname that didn't
conform to the tradition of being someone's "dotter" or "son" -- and two of my
uncles did not adopt "Holmgren" as their name, but rather called themselves
(after my grandfather Magnus Johansson) "Magnusson". Which probably explains
why, since at least the sixteenth century, the Swedes kept very careful public
records of births, marriages, and deaths in even the tiniest hamlets: there
wasn't any other way to trace lineage and descent than through a written
record. In Java, today, almost every traditional person changes his name three
or four times in his lifetime, roughly corresponding to the ancient Brahmanical
concept of four stages of life (youth, professional development, family,
ascetical searching for wisdom). The new name, and/or the signal to change it,
generally comes in a dream; and the name is always in some sense personally
appropriate. When I lived in Indonesia for almost 20 years, I used half a
dozen different names, generally assigned to me by people in a village or
region. I was constantly traveling (buying antiquities), and I would
frequently encounter my own ghost en route: people would say things like, "oh,
but Pak Kasim [Kasim being one of my aliases] was here last week, and he
offered TWICE as much money".

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Robert Holmgren
holmgren@xxxxxxxx
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