{"id":220,"date":"2003-04-17T20:41:34","date_gmt":"2003-04-18T00:41:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/04\/17\/i-hope-nomen-est-omen-not\/"},"modified":"2007-02-14T11:17:49","modified_gmt":"2007-02-14T15:17:49","slug":"i-hope-nomen-est-omen-not","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/2003\/04\/17\/i-hope-nomen-est-omen-not\/","title":{"rendered":"I hope nomen est omen not"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a> In the holiday spirit, I thought I’d share something that has left me feeling rather puzzled and with a bit of an odd sense of discomfort. Some months ago I searched the web to find information about the origin of my surname. I always found it funny that it’s a Dutch word that means “trouble,” and that taken together with the Dutch “macher,” it means “troublemaker.” But in my websearch, I came across a Stanford site, Hebrew Words in Dutch (via Yiddish)<\/a>, that gave “heibel” a new spin. If the research on this site is correct, my name apparently does indeed mean “trouble, commotion,” but it derives from the Hebrew word “hewel,” which means … “a vain cause.” A vain cause? What am I supposed to do, shoot myself? Are there people out there called Meschugge or Toges (tachat) or Treife (terefa)? There’s a shoemaker called Seibel, which according to this site comes from “sebel” which means …dung. How do you cope with such a moniker? What do people with weird names do to compensate? Should I have taken my husband’s last name? Nah, that would have made my initials YB, which begs the question, “why not?” Talk about vain cause. I’m stuck. Prior to the internet, I wouldn’t have discovered this unflattering tidbit, but that’s where information overload gets you: looking over your shoulder, wondering about vain causes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the holiday spirit, I thought I’d share something that has left me feeling rather puzzled and with a bit of an odd sense of discomfort. Some months ago I searched the web to find information about the origin of my surname. I always found it funny that it’s a Dutch word that means “trouble,” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":311,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[600],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-220","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-yulelogstories"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/311"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/yulelog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}