"Barack"

[Laurence Horn]

At 2:23 PM -0400 8/29/08, Wilson Gray wrote:
>I'm sorry, Benjamin. I should have read your post more closely. I
>basically skipped over what I was already familiar with, B-R-K,
>whereas what was new, B-R-Q, commanded all of my attention, not to
>mention that I had the Barcas, Hamilcar and Hannibal, on my mind. And
>I also was feeling that "Lightning" was a cooler, goner, and more
>kick-ass name, under the circumstances, than the very banal "Blessed."
>OTOH, under the very same circumstances, Obama is hardly in a position
>to be seen as threatening in any way, even metaphorically. Not even
>little old colored church ladies would go for that.
>
>-Wilson

Well, I don't know.  "Blessed" reminds us of sneezes, which could
presage pneumonia...

LH

>
>On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 8:01 AM, Benjamin Zimmer
><bgzimmer at babel.ling.upenn.edu> wrote:
>>  ---------------------- Information from the mail header
>>-----------------------
>>  Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>>  Poster:       Benjamin Zimmer <bgzimmer at BABEL.LING.UPENN.EDU>
>>  Subject:      Re: "Barack"
>>
>>-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>>  On Fri, Aug 29, 2008 at 2:13 AM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>  Did anyone else notice that Obama himself has said that his name means
>>>  "blessed" and not "lightning"? I don't know enough Semitic, uh,
>>>  Semetic, to know whether he's be right or whether his father made a
>>>  mistake.
>>
>>  No mistake. As I wrote on Aug. 20, in response to your "Hi!" post...
>>
>>  There are two different Semitic roots: "Barack" (as in Obama) and
>>  "baruch" derive from B-R-K 'bless', while "Barak" (as in Ehud) and
>>  "Barca" derive from B-R-Q 'lightning'. For more on this, see my two
>>  Language Log posts:
>>
>>  http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004187.html
>>  http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004196.html
>>
>>
>>  --Ben Zimmer
>>
>>  ------------------------------------------------------------
>>  The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>>
>
>
>
>--
>All say, "How hard it is that we have to die"---a strange complaint to
>come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
>-----
>-Mark Twain
>
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