What's in a name?

I’ve always been interested in etymology (the study and meaning of names) probably a result of the childhood trauma I suffered at not being able to find pens or keyrings adorned with my name and name description. Everybody has had one at one point and at the time it felt like all my primary school contemporaries wafted around with their branded items on show.

I used to glare at the Rachel's and Rebecca's of this world and be consumed with jealously at their ability to buy such treasure. It's not that Ruth is a particularly rare name, I think it’s present enough that everybody knows of a Ruth by some means, it just doesn’t saturate our lives as much as some of the more popular names do, and for that reason isn't worthy of a space-limited spot on a keyring rack. 

I will always remember the epiphany I experienced on realising that ‘Ruth’ is not typically associated with the young ‘uns when in an episode of Friends, Ross suggests to Rachel they call their unborn daughter Ruth, to which Rachel replies, “Oh, I’m sorry, are we having an 89-year-old?”.

Such discrimination against my old-lady name haunted me for years until I finally came across my very own special magnet with my name on it. Though the magnet is long lost, I still remember what it read:

Ruth

From the Hebrew meaning friend.

She is strong, dedicated, hard working and well respected; she will fight for those she loves. A born leader.

No, I haven’t made that up to make myself sound good, here is further proof! My babe of a friend, Chesca sent me this little present in the post a couple of months ago and to say that I was excited is an understatement. A keyring with my name on it!

Think I’ve found my new CV opening line...



All this talk of leadership is making me want to grab my pipe and play it through the streets of Hamelin. Follow me ratties! 

Further research confirmed that ultimately Ruth means ‘friend’ (big smiles J) and then I found this lovely complimentary description which satisfactorily stroked my ego:

People with this name tend to be a powerful force to all whose lives they touch. They are capable, charismatic leaders who often undertake large endeavours with great success. They value truth, justice, and discipline, and may be quick-tempered with those who do not. If they fail to develop their potential, they may become impractical and rigid.

I’m willing to overlook the fact that this makes me sound like I could be a leader of a sect or cult. 

I then came across another description which claimed Ruth to be an American name and that it instead means: Drunk, satisfied. Ha!

I gotta say though, the majority of the descriptions offered are spot on. I do value truth and justice a lot. I wouldn’t describe myself as a leader (not yet, but who knows, maybe in the future) but I am hard working and love making new friends. 

This made me wonder if I am a product of my name, whether my personality was destined upon my naming, or whether on reading that keyring description which I so longed for years ago, I subconsciously took on the prophetic traits. Or maybe it’s just a coincidence.

Either way, it got me thinking, would I be a different person if I’d been given a different name? This led me on a manhunt to find the scraps of yellow paper my mother had written on 22 years ago with her list of potential baby names for the parasite growing within.  

Here for your perusal is a legitimate selection of some of the names on her list, and their name meanings:

Beatrice: (meaning: voyager through life, blessed)

Bernadette: (meaning: bear-like bravery, or simply, bear.  She obviously wanted me to become a nun. Sister Bernadette has quite the ring to it)

Bertha: (meaning: bright)

Carolina: (pronounced: karo-lee-nah. Meaning: woman. Well, that’s accurate at least)

Esperanza: (meaning: ‘hope’)

Esther: (meaning: star. Love this name!)

Also included in the list was my mother’s own name! I would find this hilariously self-centred if it wasn’t for the fact that my lack of affinity for many girls names means that dare I have more than two daughters I may have to resort to having a mini Ruth myself.

To end, my personal favourite- Olga. It has such a ring to it with my surname but sadly not with my physical appearance. I always think of Olga’s as big, strong, and tall women-completely my opposite. Meaning: holy, blessed.

On reading the list (and not quite sure what to make of it) I went to ask both my lifegivers how close I was to being named something other than Ruth. The mothership and fathertron both replied that it had been a very easy decision, Ruthie all the way, no contest.

It was quite lucky that they both liked Ruth as my father didn’t get much say in my naming.  I get the impression that if he had sole responsibility I would’ve ended up being called something like Kevin.

Go check out your name! See what you think; is it accurate with your personality? You might learn something about yourself. I encourage it! I implore you! I beseech you! Then come and tell me what it means.

Yours as ever,

Olga.

What's in a name?

That which we call a rose.

By any other name would smell as sweet. 

The Bird Murderer

A couple of weeks ago, I went out in the garden to say good morning to my faithful sidekick, Mr. Pickles, the lop-eared rabbit, when I came across a crime scene.

Feathers everywhere.

No corpse, no fingerprints, no weapons, no sign of a break-in, the assailant had been clever to leave no incriminating evidence. Just…feathers.

The victim appeared to be a small bird judging by the length of its feathers. The murder scene was directly in front of Mr. Pickles’ hutch, the perfect witness, except he wasn’t because a) he’s a rabbit and b) he can’t talk, see [a].

Then, last week, the plot thickened. Another murder. We have a serial killer on our hands.  This time, the feathers were strewn all over the garden, many more than the time before, big, long, grey feathers that looked like they belonged to a collard dove.

This was a more brutal murder, this time he had left the body behind. Or parts of it, it’s hard to tell. Flies were gathering by the time I plucked (wink, wink) up the courage to investigate the scene.

I could only hope it wasn’t one of our beloved collard doves who visit our garden every day and sit on the same spot on the fence, watching the world pass by. And probably look for scrummy worms and berries too.  We’ve had these two collard doves visit our garden for donkeys years (realistically, it’s probably been several generations visit us but I like to think it’s the same elderly dove pair year-on-year).

The murder scene was directly beneath their spot on the fence. 

Keeping watch from the house, I spotted one of the doves later in the day sitting on the fence. Just the one. I began to get a bit concerned as to where the other one was…there is always two of them, but not that day. I fear the worst.

The days pass and the evidence decomposes into the ground, completing the life cycle. Then, today I see the collard doves! Two of them on the fence! They are sitting next to each other but one is much smaller than the other. I think it’s a baby, coming to learn the ways of the fence, or coming to mourn a parent.

Why is X the unknown?

Here is a link to a video I saw a couple of months ago which really impressed me, so I felt the need to share it. The speaker, Terry Moore, seems like a fascinating guy- not only did he learn Arabic from scratch whilst in his 40's, but it helped him to provide an explanation for a concept we all take for granted: Why is it the letter ‘X’ represents the unknown?

We use X fairly often in everyday speech, which when you think about it, are all used to explain an unknown.

For example:

      -X in mathematics and algebra. Find X. Which always reminds me of this...

     -X-rays, so called because Wilhelm Rontgen (discoverer) did not know what they were.

     -X marks the spot. X is often used to depict the supposed location of an unknown hidden treasure.

     -The X Files: American TV show based around unsolved FBI cases involving unknown paranormal phenomena.

     -Malcolm Little changed his name to Malcolm X to represent his true African family name that he never knew.

     - You could maybe even claim that X as the unknown is responsible for the coining of the word ‘extra’ which goes on to form words such as extraterrestrial which has connotations with the term UFO (Unknown Flying Object)*. 

The video is also relevant for today’s post as he explains Spain’s involvement in the formation of this usage of X and as I’ve just returned from Spain it’s fairly apt!

Give the video a try, it might seem boring but I promise you will learn something! If you don’t watch the video, at least skip to the end, at 3:34 when he provides the short version of why we use X when talking about an unknown thing. 

(This is just an idea I postulated, no idea if there’s any proof behind it).

Job Rejection No.2

-Sales and Marketing Graduate Scheme, Danone.

£26K.

Fell in love with this salary job. I’d been eyeing it up since March but had to wait until applications opened in June before I could get my hands on it. It sounded perfect; a year-long graduate scheme at a global company, great pay, great ethics, great benefits (free Activia anyone?) with the opportunity to learn so much in the business world. I was already envisioning myself in the office….

When the applications opened, I practically wrote a thesis proclaiming my perfectness for the job and showed my knowledge of Danone to impress them (by the time I’d finished researching the company I probably knew more about Danone than Danone knows about Danone) which paid off as I received an email saying I’d got through to the next stage! Excitement ensued.

Then I found out the next stage was verbal and numerical reasoning tests.

Fiddlesticks.

Why cruel world why.

I wasn’t expecting tests, though I should have been considering the amount of stages in job applications you have go through these days: CV, covering letter, aptitude tests, phone interview, recruitment day, actual interview, signing away of soul…surely the next stage in the process is dinner and a movie? I did give them my number after all.

Back to the tests, verbal I can handle, numerical was the loose string…

I get going on the practice verbal test; it’s not your standard SAT question like, ‘which word means the same as the target word?’ or ‘which is the correct spelling?’. It seemed to test whether you can deduce the key message from a given paragraph and state whether the following statement is true, false or not applicable. I got 79% on that test, things are looking good, surely that would be a pass. Now onto the maths part…

I’m not baaaad at maths, I’m just a bit rusty. I can do my times tables up to 12, what more do you need?? I once managed to get 65% on a second year statistics exam the morning after a Kings of Leon concert so I’m thinking I could be in with a chance, nevermind the fact that I miraculously got a grade A at maths GCSE, which is the proudest moment of my life to date. When future kiddywinks come along, they’re gonna have to be pretty damn special to knock that A grade off the number 1 spot for greatest life achievement. 

Only kidding. 

Kind of.

And when it comes to the old epitaph writing, future husband is going to have to battle it out with Mrs. Sharp (GCSE year maths teacher) for who gets the prized mentioning as the love of my life.

So, I dust off the old calculator ready for the practice numerical test (40 minutes long mind you, I missed countdown for this dammit) with a positive attitude that yes, I CAN do this.

I get 24%.

Seems like I can’t do it after all! Reader, it was so difficult, it wasn’t normal! You don’t need a calculator to solve those problems- you need a fully staffed, state of the art computer lab cross-correlating algorithms and code breakers whilst undergoing statistical analyses.

There were about 30 questions, and every two questions the ‘story’ of the question changed, complete with a different spreadsheet, graph or corresponding image and you had to extract the information from the image, read the question, do the appropriate calculation then pick one of the 5 multiple choice answers in the space of 75 seconds. Nine times out of ten the number I came up with didn’t match any of the choices given….whoops?

The time pressure made it worse. I like to console myself on these dark summer nights that if it hadn’t been timed I would've scored higher. My ego has suffered badly from the experience; it hardly ever comes out of its room, never eats, and spends its days alternating between crying and haphazardly shouting out the Fibonacci sequence, usually in the wrong order mind you.  However they were only practice tests, so I got back on my horse and galloped onto GCSE Bitesize for a good 90 minutes to revise percentages and ratios before doing the real deal.

As it turns out the real deal verbal test went worse than the practice however I did do better on  the numerical test but I immediately knew that it still wasn’t enough to pass, which was confirmed by an email later that day. Followed by another email the day after telling me I hadn’t passed. Gees, kick me while I’m down why don’t you! I don’t need to be reminded that I failed your homemade intelligence test, screw you Danone, I don’t need you  or your lifetime supply of yoghurty goodness, because at least I can make 9 letter words on Countdown!* 

No, truthfully I wasn’t too bothered at the end of the day, yes the money would’ve been amazing, but it might come along with a lot of pressure, and yes the marketing aspect would’ve been perfect, but the slow, soul destroying reality of admitting I also worked in ‘sales’ would’ve got to me a few years down the line as I bathed in my golden bathtub looking out onto the veranda to my golden egg laying hen. I don’t think I have it in me to be one of those hard selling, shrewd business types and I’m not yet sure if this is a blessing or a burden (I like to think blessing). A job in sales just makes me think of those in-your-face types who practically bully you into buying their product. I hate the hard sell, if someone wants something, they’ll buy it. If the product is good enough and good value, they won’t need you to sell it to them, they’ll already be buying it.  Every year on The Apprentice when the selling task turns up I cringe at the tactics and lengths some people will go to sell something, it seems so immoral!

Speaking of Apprentice, allow me to introduce you to my future husband, Nick from series 8:

He doesn’t know it yet but we are soulmates.

Anyways, the thing that really made me happy that I didn’t progress to the next stage was I know I could not have lived with the fact that I worked for a company whose recruitment email was spelt ‘recrutement@danone’. Seriously. Seriously. They need to fix that. Painful. My eyes. Maybe they’ve been focussing too much on the sums and not enough on the spelling ;)

Edit: At this stage of writing the post I had a lightbulb moment…

Dammit. In a moment of clarity I suddenly had a thought I better check the olde English-French dictionary for the translation of the word ‘recruitment’ and sure enough recruitment in French is spelt ‘recrutement’ which explains their email (I remembered from my research of the company that they have their headquarters in France). So technically it’s not an error, which now takes away the joy I had in not progressing further. But still their email function is obviously flawed if it goes around telling dejected rejects that they’re rejected more than once. So much ject to deal with. 

Nevermind, in the wise words of Timon and Pumbaa, Hakuna Matata!

You can all thank me later when you catch yourself humming that damn catchy tune, feeling instantly happier. 

*small print: this has only happened 4 times. But have it be known I did get the conundrum once too.

Cartilage Capitalism

The other day I spent £3 getting an earring taken out. It took approximately one second to unscrew. I’d gone back to the shop where I had got it pierced, explained to them I’ve been trying to take it out for about 3 weeks now with no luck, and if they could take it out for me.

They said they could, HOORAY! followed by “It’ll cost £3” BOO. I had to recover my shock quickly and assess the situation. It was a matter of morals. I refuse to go to coffee shops that charge more than £1 for a cup of tea (£3.25 for some hot water, milk, and leaves!? I don’t think so!) let alone pay £3 to the person who screwed the earring on too tight in the first place.

In the end I decided I would rather pay £3 and have it taken out now before I damage my ear any further with various yanking, clamping and pulling techniques.

Surely that’s the quickest £3 she’s ever earned (heheh). At this rate, she could make £10,800 in an hour.

$_$

Seriously though, I naively thought they would have done it for free, even more ridiculous was the fact I had to make an appointment! For one second of their time. I would've been happy to lean over the counter and have it done there in the middle of the shop floor. I asked how she took it out so quickly and she revealed the secret to screwball earrings was latex gloves. Ah, of course. Because we all have a pair of latex gloves lying around at home don’t we? Everybody knows only doctors and serial killers use latex gloves, duuuh. 

What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve been made to pay for?