Etymology

Name:

Jerome Emmanuel Bleton

 
Grandpa Joe, a noted Jewish psychiatrist and lover of good cigars, had the idea that my name was derived from the Hebrew יִרְמְיָהוּ (Yirmiyahu or Jeremy, like the biblical prophet), which means "Yahweh has uplifted," but it seems, after a google search, that he was mistaken and that the names are etymologically unrelated.

My mother, on the other hand, was keen to call me Jerome because she thought it was the French equivalent to the Polish name Jarosław, which means "fierce and glorious," but more importantly was the name of an older boy she admired or maybe had a crush on when she was a kid.

So it turns out the maternal side of my family has a rather spotty record in terms of philology, but families are in the business of mythmaking anyways, and I'm perfectly content to be uplifted, fierce and glorious if it pleases them.

In the end, and rather more boringly, Jerome happens to be the vulgarized latinate version of ‘Ιερωνυμος (Hieronymos), a Greek name which means "sacred name."

Sacrebleu!

My (silent) middle name, Emmanuel, is a Hebrew name (עִמָּנוּאֵל) which means "God is with us," and was the foretold name of the Messiah in the Old Testament. Don't get too excited though: as far as I know, I'm not actually the Messiah.

In fact, I bear this (silent) Emmanuel not as a discreet badge of Jewishness but because my kindhearted longsuffering flat-nosed French Protestant paternal grandmother was called Emma (from the germanic ermen, meaning "whole" or "universal").

Bleton, of course, is my father's surname. It has its own muddled origin myth, started by one of my grandfather's turbulent brothers, who did some rather questionable research sometime in the early 1960s, and hastily concluded that the family originally emigrated to France from somewhere in England (perhaps Blayton or Belton?) sometime during the Middle Ages. Or something... The first Bleton he found in the record was French though: he was condemned to be broken on the wheel for having stolen a horse.

More convincingly, my father told me that "bleton" is the name of the larch tree (Larix decidua) in the Franco-Provençal dialect that used to be spoken in the central region of France. 

It is a conifer but it nevertheless cheekily sheds its needles in winter only to be reborn again and glory in the spring sunshine. And quite right! Because why should the leafy trees have all the fun?