On the Dangers of Name Etymology

Having recently discovered that I get to be someone's strange uncle (woot!), I find myself once again on those websites that give the etymology and meaning behind names. I love this stuff, because it has almost no real application. Apparently, my surname means we hail from England (someone once claimed to have traced my family to the Mayflower - not sure if I believe that one, but there you go), and it's based on on the word for flame. Hopefully, saying someone was flaming back then meant something different.

Then I looked into the etymology of my first name, and I kind of wish I hadn't. Apparently, Roger means "famous with the spear". If that's not phallic enough for you, according to this site, it was also used as slang for a man's you-know-what from 1650-1870, and then was used to mean getting it on from 1711. I guess now we know why the pirates considered it jolly. Charming.

Anyway, what put me on this path was seeing a headline where a dude running for some Government position has the last name Weiner, which I consider to be one of the more unfortunate last names for obvious reasons. I decided to seek out where the pejorative use of wiener came from, and according to the same site, it's actually a shortened version of wienerwurst, which is a sausage. Due to the sausage shape, it too became a word to refer to a man's junk (just how many names do we need for this thing, anyway). Sure, they switched the 'i' and 'e', but we all read and pronounce it the same, and I'm sorry, but the headline "Weiner Running For Mayor" will always make me giggle no matter how old I get.

I keeps it real like that.

If this is accurate - and it's on the internet, so I have no reason to doubt it - that means that at some point, they were handing out surnames, and when they got to Hans, they said, "Dude, I think we're just going to name you after those sausages you're always eating", and Hans was all, "Whatever. Did you remember to grab some mustard on the way over?". (I don't speak a lot of German, but I understand that to those fluent in the language, they all sound like that.) From that point on, there were a group of people who were inextricably tied to sausages, as well as other, more saucy themes, through their names, and they have bravely gone forward, bringing generation after generation of Weiner into the world. Good for them.

I'd of changed it to Smith myself, but I guess that's what separates me from the Weiners.