Names

A friend passed along the supplements to H.L. Mencken's The American Language in January. It took some discipline to read anything else for the next couple of weeks.

Supplement Two a section given to American names, with much interesting matter. I had never suspected the presence of the Welsh "Ap" in such names as "Powell" (Ap Howell) or "Pugh" (Ap Hugh). I had some notion of the butchery worked on unfamiliar names at American ports of entry, and of simplifications worked since. That General Pershing's ancestors were Pferschings I had never heard.

Mencken gives lists of both women's and men's names that he considers to have been chosen for novelty. Some would not now raise an eyebrow, having been made familiar through show business--Bette, Mariel, Petula--or otherwise, for example Darlene. Many still stand out as eccentric (Vomera), others lack only an adjustment to their spelling to be standard, as Calista.

In the list of surnames Mencken thought unusual, I saw "Pancake". According to my father, his father spoke of a cousin who married a Pancake. My father supposed the name to derive from the German "Pfannkuchen". In the late 1970s, the writer Breece D'J. Pancake published some excellent short stories. At the moment, the president of the Association for Computing Machinery is Dr.  Cherri Pancake, professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Oregon State University. The Pancakes don't seem to be going away.