Tiffany problems

[Nortaneous]

> Stephen Langton (c. 1150 – 9 July 1228) was an English Cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church and Archbishop of Canterbury between 1207 and his death in 1228.

[Salmoneus]

I don't get it. Do you find "Stephen" a modern name?

Personally, I think of it as being a rather archaic name. It was extremely popular in the middle ages. King Stephen ruled England 1135-1154. The day after Christmas is called St Stephen's Day, after St Stephen of Jerusalem, the first Christian martyr in AD 34 - not to be confused with the St Stephen, the first King of Hungary until 1038, after whom the Crown of Saint Stephen is named.

There have been at least 10 St Stephens, including Pope Stephen; St Stephen's Cathedral (built 1160) is the seat of the Archbishop of Vienna. There have been at least 13 King Stephens.

[Chuma]

Concerning things that have been around longer than one might think: When playing in rock bands, I've found it fascinating that the company Zildjian, the biggest manufacturer of cymbals, is 401 years old. It was founded by an Ottoman alchemist, in an attempt to make gold.

As for the thing where film characters speak broken English, around here (in Sweden) is is often met with smug laughter. Since we're used to subtitles, we typically have foreign characters speaking in the appropriate languages. Granted, that mainly applies to small parts of films.

[Nortaneous]

I don't get it. Do you find "Stephen" a modern name?

It's reasonably common in America.

I've found it fascinating that the company Zildjian, the biggest manufacturer of cymbals, is 401 years old.

Nintendo was founded as a playing card company in 1889. Beretta was founded in the early 16th century. The Franziskaner brewery is alleged to be over 650 years old.

According to Wikipedia, the oldest company in the world was a Japanese construction company that operated from 578 AD to 2006.

[Curlyjimsam]

I don't get it. Do you find "Stephen" a modern name?

I think the point is that "Stephen Langton" would be utterly unremarkable as a name of someone living today, which is not true of most of the names of people from his lifetime we are likely to come across nowadays (compare the names here and here, the great majority of which are not likely to be the names of someone on your street in 2019).

[Moose-tache]

I don't get it. Do you find "Stephen" a modern name?

I think the point is that "Stephen Langton" would be utterly unremarkable as a name of someone living today, which is not true of most of the names of people from his lifetime we are likely to come across nowadays (compare the names here and here, the great majority of which are not likely to be the names of someone on your street in 2019).

That really just comes down to Stephen having a sobriquet that would serve as a modern surname. Emma of Normandy would have a perfectly modern name if you changed "of Normandy" to "Norman." Henry Plantagenet would be fine if Plantagenet hadn't been a one-off name made to describe his habit of using broom flower as a symbol. If you had anyone in the medieval period who happened to have a sobriquet that is the same as a town name or something, it would probably pass today. In some cases a language shift might help. "Peter the Bald" could be "Pete LeChauve" with a little trickery. This is basically how we get "Charles Martel," but sadly Martel doesn't hold much cache as an English surname these days.

[zompist]

I think the point is that "Stephen Langton" would be utterly unremarkable as a name of someone living today, which is not true of most of the names of people from his lifetime we are likely to come across nowadays (compare the names here and here, the great majority of which are not likely to be the names of someone on your street in 2019).

Well, several things are going on there. 12C naming conventions were less restrictive; people still remembered are likely to be aristocrats; spelling conventions have changed; some surnames have gone out of use.

Still, the modern pattern is well represented— e.g. William Adelin, Hugh Bardulf, Thomas Basset, William Bendings, Thomas Brun, Rosamund Clifford, Alice FitzRoy, Edith Forne, John Cotton, John Marshal, William Meschin, Alexander Neckam, Ralph Niger, Robert Pantulf, William Paynel, Stephen Thurnham.

[Salmoneus]

Yeah, a lot of those names are completely unstrange today. Roger Bacon, Alan Basset, Richard Batchden, Thomas Grey, Nicholas Farnham, Christina Carpenter etc.

The exceptions are mostly rich French people. Their names are unusual today in England because you don't get a lot of French people here these days, relatively speaking - you still get people with surnames like "de Beauchamp" and "Devereux", it's just that they're either in France or they're ridiculously posh. As they were back then, too!

Many of these names are also misleading, since a lot of the unusual bit is actually title, not name. Lots of the "de" and "of" in these "names" actually signifies that what comes next is a title, the place that they're in charge of. This is why some of them seem to have two surnames - so, "Roger Mortimer de Chirk" is actually a bloke named "Roger Mortimer" (perfectly normal name, if not common), who happened to be Lord of Chirk. Some of these names are also not what people would actually have called them at the time - I think "Roger Mortimer de Chirk" is probably mostly called that by historians who want to distinguish him from his father, also called Roger Mortimer (1st Baron Mortimer). People at the time would probably have called him either by his name, Roger Mortimer, or by his title, "my Lord of Chirk", not by both. It's kind of like saying that "King Henry VIII" is an odd name, because "VIII" is a weird surname to have...

Similarly, a guy like "Andrew of Cornwall" is really just "a bloke called Andrew, who may or may not have had a surname we don't know, but who was apparently from Cornwall". It's as though you wrote in your diary that you'd been out drinking with "Mike from Newcastle", and people five hundred years from now assumed that "from Newcastle" was actually his surname.

[Curlyjimsam]

I think the point is that "Stephen Langton" would be utterly unremarkable as a name of someone living today, which is not true of most of the names of people from his lifetime we are likely to come across nowadays (compare the names here and here, the great majority of which are not likely to be the names of someone on your street in 2019).

Well, several things are going on there. 12C naming conventions were less restrictive; people still remembered are likely to be aristocrats; spelling conventions have changed; some surnames have gone out of use.

Still, the modern pattern is well represented— e.g. William Adelin, Hugh Bardulf, Thomas Basset, William Bendings, Thomas Brun, Rosamund Clifford, Alice FitzRoy, Edith Forne, John Cotton, John Marshal, William Meschin, Alexander Neckam, Ralph Niger, Robert Pantulf, William Paynel, Stephen Thurnham.

I think the only surnames in that list I've actually encountered in real life are "Cotton" (which still feels quite unusual) and "Marshall". "Stephen Langton" still feels very normal compared to the others.

Obviously naming conventions were different in the twelfth century. And the names of people who are still considered notable from back then aren't a representative sample of the names of the whole population. But while this helps us understand why a name like "Stephen Langton" might seem weirdly modern for a medieval bloke, it doesn't negate the fact that it does (for some of us anyway).

[Moose-tache]

The original purpose of this thread was to highlight things that are representative of the real past, but which are not believable as the past to modern readers. No one is going to do a double take when they encounter "And then Stephen Langton the bishop rode to Buckstonheath to warn the friar about vagabonds" in a fantasy novel. I think readers would be more surprised by a line like: "Growing up in Lincolnshire, Stephen went to university overseas, as was normal and expected at the time."

[mèþru]

Stephen isn't odd to me, but I would be really surprised to see a Steve or Steven

[Vijay]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DRoTHnt5Fg.

I mean, I've seen Family Matters take on some real issues, but...damn. They even made the "bad guys" in this particular case sound almost convincing before immediately taking them down.

[Pabappa]

oh, i thought of another one. i know nothing about fishing, so ... maybe this isnt so amazing to some of you guys, but ... fly fishing is over 1800 years old. whereas i had assumed it was only nets and spears until a few generations ago.

Pills are also just about as old, though they had little in common with what we would call a pill today other than the concept.

[Pabappa]

Abraham Lincoln used "cool" in an 1860 speech:

In that supposed event, you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool.

This does not seem to be the modern sense, unless we assume sarcasm here. The modern sense may have originated as sarcasm, however, ... it's difficult to tell what comes from what when our earliest sightings for two senses of the word both go back to 1868:

"She has been a guest of yours at this house," I answered. "May I venture to suggest — if nothing was said about me beforehand — that I might see her here?"
"Cool!" said Mr. Bruff. With that one word of comment on the reply that I had made to him, he took another turn up and down the room.

vs

"Well, that's cool," said Laurie to himself, "to have a picnic and never ask me!"

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cool#Adjective

[zompist]

The Alcott seems clearly to mean "cold". That makes sense of the other two citations as well.

(The "neat!" sense of "cool" dates back at least to the 1950s— I recall a Mad article that had to explain it. It's probably older, but not 1860s older...)

[Pabappa]

We might want to bring this up at Wiktionary, then .... because they are listing the Moonshiner novel as being an explicit use of the modern sense of the word. I can see how the word may have originated as a negative term, and been used in a sarcastically positive way for a long time before going mainstream, but I think sarcasm in the other direction is more common.

[Whimemsz]

Someone on the talk page has already pointed out that in context "cool" in the Collins quote means "bold, audacious" or the like, but apparently no one bothered to do anything about it. Etymonline dates "cool" in the positive slang sense to the 1930s-40s, apparently originally from jazz terminology and then African American slang more generally.

[Pabappa]

Thanks. Ive clearly been losing my touch lately because I should have seen that when I made my own post there. I will clear it up soon if nobody else does.

[Raphael]

I learned a few hours ago that the song "Nel blu, dipinto di blu", probably better known in the English-speaking world as "The Volare Song", dates back to 1958. I never expected it to be that old. If, before now, I would have seen a scene from a movie made in, say, the early 1960s with a drunken crowd singing "Volaaaaare - oh-oh", that would definitely have been a Tiffany Problem for me.

[Linguoboy]

I learned a few hours ago that the song "Nel blu, dipinto di blu", probably better known in the English-speaking world as "The Volare Song", dates back to 1958. I never expected it to be that old. If, before now, I would have seen a scene from a movie made in, say, the early 1960s with a drunken crowd singing "Volaaaaare - oh-oh", that would definitely have been a Tiffany Problem for me.

Not only that it was featured in the Eurovision Song Contest for that year.

A couple friends of mine were very surprised to discover that the ESC itself dates back to 1956. They only became aware of it in the 00s or later and I think they believed it inspired such vocal competition shows as American Idol, The Voice, and The X-Factor rather than being the grandmother of them all. (Which I guess makes the Sanremo Music Festival the bisnonna.)