I’m starting to wonder if I, perhaps, have a thing for/ about names …?
Unclear up until recently; the evidence has been there all along. Skip the childhood and Human Resource references, and I can still find quite a few instances where the significance of names; or at least my curiosities thereon, have made itself clear to me.
Don’t get me wrong; I am very much against all the name changes our country has experience; more so, against the number of resources wasted upon it.
In saying that, I am a sucker for the original… of most, if not all things. Always been interested in etymology and more often than not, to my detriment… weird right? Not if you step back just a tad further…
With anything, go back, find who named it – because their perspective matters. Then find out what they named it, in their language and when. Mother tongue + understanding = such a raw truth in name origin.
‘n Ysterhout for example… I mean, you cannot deny its truth by its name at all. It is in fact a wood with a silver/grey tint; a very heavy and very hard wood… net soos yster. When genera in scientific naming came along, we called it Olea capensis… meaning something live ‘The olive of the Cape’…
I roll my eyes and smirk… because wow, what a prediction… dis we always know, somehow… inherently… that one day; we’ll just everything by the fruit/value it provides and not by its truth at all…?
On a side note, and just to make this blog longer. Here’s piece i added to The Hogsback Times in March 2026.
