What would you do with a Wetwang?

So what would be your answer to the title question? Would you eat it, offer it as a service to someone, or live in it? 

The fact is that I love names. Indeed the whole aspect of naming someone or something sould require imagination or knowledge, or it may be something as simple as a feeling. Depending on your cultural background there may be a ritual involved where perhaps the first thing that you see following the birth of a child is used, or, for the sake of posterity, the taking of your father's name and adding a number at the end.

In his book "Notes From a Small Island", the author Bill Bryson takes great delight in highlighting some of the more unusual place names that may be found on a trip around the UK. I am ever curious to know how places wind up with the names that they do. Sometimes it's a simple process of moving from an olde English name where -brook, -ton, and -ford all have meanings to their suffix (eg. the ending -ton, as in Darlington, could mean homestead). The name of the village of Wetwang in this blog's title, and also my favourite place name ever, is supposedly derived from an old Norse word meaning "Field for the trial of a legal action".

Our own names and family names are equally fascinating. It would appear that my family surname of Stoker has a number of possible origins. Firstly it may be attributed to an inhabitant of the city of Stoke-on-Trent. Examples of this could be, say, Lyndsay Buckingham of Fleetwood Mac or David Coverdale of Whitesnake, but probably not Hannah Montana . Secondly, the job of a stoker was to put coal into a furnace so it could come from that, or there is even a link to arsonism too. I've been able to go back 4 generations on the Stoker family tree with no sign of residency in Staffordshire however my brother lives there nowcoincidentally and neither is there a link to stoking or arson.

Before Indonesia I lived for a short while in Thailand and the general feeling is that most short surnames are from indigenous Thai families whereas the longer surnames are more often linked with Chinese immigrants. The Thai nicknames are much more visual and often relate to something around you. If you wish to convey size, you might use a nickname for something that represents that size.

Western names are generally family linked in the surname but the first and middle names are not averse to representing the parents love of sport or gardening, or even the city of conception.  Here in Indonesia that doesn't necessarily have to be the case as families are not bound by the same constraints. Depending upon your ethnicity you may have one or more names and none might represent any familial link. This freedom allows parents much greater flexibility and only recently I came across Ronald Reagan and Abraham Lincoln. Indonesia is blessed with such different tribal and religious ethnicities that it is reasonable to find many varieties of names and structures. My wife falls into the cateogary of only having one name, Yohana, but due to the need to synchronise forms and paperwork on her passport it says Yohana Yohana and she only refers to herself on social media with my family name.

When we do eventually get around to having a family I can only hope that propriety isn't our only focus and we choose something suitable...