#the name game
qv:
the name tyler sounds like it was first used post-ww2 like maybe 1960 until you find out it literally meant “guy who lays tile” (tile-er) 11th century england to refer to people that built houses. and then you read it as tile -er for the rest of yourlife
does piper mean guy who lays pipe
I know this is a sex joke, but… do people genuinely not know that a lot of surnames stem from professions? Tiler/Tyler became the surname for somebody who laid tile. Piper became a surname for somebody who played the pipes. Archer, Brewer, Butler, Carpenter, Clerk/Clark, Dexter, Farmer, Fisher, Mason, Miller, Potter, Sawyer, Sheppard/Shepherd, Smith, Tanner, Taylor/Tailor, Weaver…
People later started to give old family surnames as first names, and then over time, many of those became popular as first names in their own right. Is… is this not known?a fun fact: germanic jews were forced en masse to adopt last names only a couple centuries ago, for tax reasons. before then it was just ‘dude son of guy’. so mostly the rabbis made everyone’s last names up themselves because they were the logical guy to do the census paperwork.
so that’s why ‘jewish names’ are so like that. goldstein (gold rock), goldfarb(gold colored), goldshmidt (goldsmith). three or four hundred years ago some tired rabbi ran out of ideas. you get tons of jews who are just something-thalbecause-thalmeans valley and that’s where they were when they got named. my favorite traditional jewish surname is just klein, small, because three hundred years ago some rabbi looked at a local guy and wrote down ‘shorty’.
