Now I want to know the name of the cat. It sounds like the perfect name for a cat.
I didn’t " hear " it, I saw it on FB. That is our primary source of communication with family over there. I am well aware of Sweden’s involvement in WW2 . Other than learning it in History , my MIL and FIL have readily shared their experiences as children growing up in that time period.
oh, and not telling, the cat is named " Pippa " …one of our daughters was in the midst of being amused with the Royal wedding a few years back , and decided that because we have the same dogs as the Queen of England , Pippa should be her name to match the dogs
Talk about poor timing… what not to name a new line of cars:
http://edition.cnn.com/2016/02/02/asia/tata-zica-unfortunate-names/
Other infamous car names:
- Chevy "Nova" in Latin America
- Mercedes "Vito" in Sweden is slang for female genitalia
- Mazda "LaPuta" -- lol... what were they thinking...
Ever heard of watermenlondra?
Lol, GMT! As we were walking through the isle of bottled beverages at Costco, Mr. pointed to a pile of cases of Zico coconut water… “Look, typos”
And in biotech news, Isis Pharmaceuticals has officially changed its name:
Betcha it cost them a pretty penny to file all that paperwork with Nasdaq etc. and get new stationary and so on.
I looked up meaning of name “Aryan” and found that it is related to Sanskrit meaning “one who does noble deeds.” In my head, I’m pronouncing it Ar-yan, not Air-ee-an.
the sad thing is that people make judgment just becasue of similar name…the example would be Isis Pharmaceuticals. There would defintely be people who “dislike” this company just because of the name “ISIS”
Aryan is a pretty common boy’s name in South Asia. “Aryan” refers to a person from Arya Vartha, land of the Aryans, e.g. roughly the Indian subcontinent. (And hence typically brown, not blonde and blue-eyed LOL.) That’s also the origin of the word “Iran.” But in the 19th century, Europeans who began to study Indo-European languages and saw the link to Sanskrit got the idea that Indo-Europeans were Nordic, making northern Europeans the original Aryans. Which wasn’t true – the original Indo-European speakers were probably from the steppes of modern-day Ukraine to Kazakhstan or thereabouts – but the word got co-opted nonetheless and fit into the racial constructs of the time.
Another common Indian / South Asian name? Swastika. For a girl. Yup. A swastika is a sacred symbol, found on everything from marriage invitations to jewelry to front gates, and the word “swastik” basically means “healthy.”
Talk about cultural appropriation – these are major parts of culture, but were misunderstood, twisted, and now have just about the nastiest, most toxic meaning anyone can imagine … which boys named Aryan and girls named Swastika are blissfully unaware of unless they’re going to the West, in which case, yikes.
One of my friends in college chose the name “Adolph” for himself, probably unaware that some would immediately think of Hitler because of that name.
I love the name chosen by one of the singers on Nashville for her daughter–Cadence.
Örjan (with an umlat, which I can’t seem to make here) is an old Swedish name. It’s a variant of George. In Norwegian it’s spelled Ørjan. In Swedish, at least it would be pronounced like Aryan.
Thank you for the umlat Skieurope!
Does anyone else remember the silly shoe Mis-name
http://www.snopes.com/business/market/incubus.asp
Yes, there are some cultures where a name might be unknown as funny/inappropriate in another language/culture. An example is Randy- a name in the US, a naughty word in the UK.
I will maintain though that there is almost no way that a young Swedish person wouldn’t know what Aryan means and is associated with- even in Sweden.
Cadence is cute , but to me it means pedaling speed for bicyclists. Aryan wasn’t the pronunciation , it is the name of the newest addition to the family . I am trying to figure out why…there is no historic significant as far as we know , and they are not what we would think of as racists .
Also strange that a person in college would have no clue about the associations with the name Adolph.
Re “Adolph” - maybe he was named after someone in the family (someone old enough to have had that very common name before 1920)? But I agree it sounds really weird.
This drives me somewhat nuts: I met a little girl with the pretty name of Eva but she pronounces it Ava. I just imagine that all her life she will be correcting people.
Agree. It’s bad enough when last names are mispronounced. Why do it with first names. Decades later I still remember a classmate having to correct teachers so many times about the pronunciation of her name. The teacher would call out her last name and she usually had to say firmly in response , It’s ___. Thinking back, I give her credit because it must have been annoying but she just firmly corrected people.
Or she’ll be living someplace that speaks a language other than English.
Or maybe even somewhere that does speak English. Doesn’t seem to have kept people from pronouncing Eva Gabor’s first name correctly, after all.