CHANCE OF NAME.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume VIII, Issue 26, 27 June 1891, Page 112

CHANCE OF NAME.

Some curious changes in names have come about in cases where Frenchmen have settled among an English-speaking people. Sometimes their names have been translated literally, and then we have such fanciful cognomens as ‘ Goodnature,’ ‘ Butterfly ’ and ‘ Cherry,’ but it often happens that the foreigner is arbitrarily rechristened by his new neighbours, who find it next to impossible to pronounce a French word, and accordingly substitute for it one with which they are familiar.

It happened once in a certain town that a French family remained nameless for some months, simply because no one could pronounce the word to which they were entitled. One day, however, a man rode up to their door and asked : ‘ Does John Mason live here ?’

‘No,’ said the man of the house ; but, as he said it, the thought occurred to him that the name was one which would give no difficulty, and that he might as well adopt it for his own. Accordingly he became John Mason with the concurrence ot his neighbours. Another Frenchman, originally Michel St. Pierre, was called so long by his Christian name that his children became known as ‘the little Michels.’ As time went on the change was universally accepted, and they were no longer St. Pierre’s, but ‘Mitchells.’ That was a solid English name which the townsfolk could countenance; St. Pierre savoured to them of ‘ French nonsense.’

‘ Who lives at the Berry farm now ?’ asked a gentleman when revisiting the town of his birth. ‘ John Berry and his family.’ ‘ But I thought the Berrys sold out and went away ?’ ‘ Oh, so they did, but these are French people who bought the farm. They had some sort of outlandish name, but of course we didn’t use it.’

A clever foreigner has said that in France women are the inferiors of men, in England their equals, and in America their superiors. An American, of the gentler sex, not too modestly, says women are men’s equals anyw’here on earth.