So, I sit around and think a lot. I think about ridiculously stupid stuff that doesn't really matter and sometimes my brain goes wild. For instance one day I was sitting there drinking coffee or something and started thinking about jolly old England. What a strange word I began to think. Eng-land? WTF is an Eng? Then it struck me, it's an accented word. A word that was once Ang - as in Anglo. Prior to becoming Anglo-Saxon, England was primarily made up of Anglos. Then it was settled by "viking" saxons who were invited to the country.

Now here is where immigration comes into play - not that it needs to be when thinking about something as ridiculous as the formation of the word England (which by the way I'm not sure if I'm right, this is just my hunch and I'll leave it to you the reader to investigate and find out if I am right in my hunch on the actual naming of England) - I promise to get back to weird things below this little rant. You see the Saxons who came to England probably referred to it as the "Land of Ang's" or Anglo's or Angle's. I came to this conclusion because the Vikings also named other locations, such as Greenland, Iceland and Newfoundland (or "New Found Land").

The history of England is a telling situation of unmitigated and unobstructed immigration. Basically what happened is that a king in England hired foreign mercenaries to help him fight. After that he allowed them to remain in an eastern portion of England. These mercenaries invited their women and children to come stay with them. Their population grew. Then they rose up after growing to a size and fought against the established social, political and military powers of the country and took over larger and larger portions.

This was mainly done through the fact that England had weak rulers who didn't see the threat. They closed their eyes to it and ignored it thinking it would go away. It was easier that way. Do you see a pattern in today's America?

Anyway back to weird words. How about Woman? Where the hell did that come from? I thought to myself. How about, a man with a womb? Wombman. Shortened to woman because of phonetics. Sounds good to me.

How about the proliferation of names that end in "son"? Well another Viking/Nordic trait. Back then they would name people so that you could trace who their parents were. A son born to Erik became "Erik's Son" or Erikson. A son of Jacob? "Jacob's Son" or Jacobson. I guess it stuck when they moved to areas that had last names and these names were passed on to daughters and future generations. If your name ends in "son" have you ever wondered who the original person whose name it carries was? Who was Jacob? Who was Erik? Who was the David who passed on Davidson down the line to you?

Another oddity, or probably just something to do with the brain's interpretation of sound is the prevalence of the "E" sound in women's names. Jenny, Julie, Trudy. I just thought of this one today. Don't know why I thought of it, but I did. Relating it to myself, they used to call me Danny when I was little. But Danny doesn't sound too manly does it? It has that "E" sound in there that makes it sound more feminine or - as viewed by a male - "childish" in sound when they get older. I dropped that "ny" quicker than a bad habit when I got older.

Of course I haven't actually looked up any of the origins of these words, it's just something that I came up with.

Hmm, nothing more for now. I think of weird crap like that all the time, maybe I should post on them more often, but they make me sound a little too weird or intellectual, me thinks.

Update
Ahh, another one I was thinking about today that I forgot to mention Caucasian. Obviously it has to be due to the Caucuses, a region between Asia and Europe, but why the heck would that be attributed to white people? I mean a person of mixed race between Europe and Asia wouldn't look much like a traditional "white" person that you would think of. How this ended up being a designation of a "typical white person" I'll never know.