30 May 2006

What's in a name?

Never mind about natural disasters or politics. The Guardian has more important things to worry about:
"When I read that Angelina and Brad have named their kid Shiloh Nouvel, my first thought was about the second name: shouldn't that be Nouvelle? My second thought was, then again, what do I know? The internet being a place where one's every idle fancy is somewhere the subject of a bad-tempered debate, it wasn't long before I found a forum thread entitled "Shiloh Nouvel: faute
d'orthographe?" One poster contends that nouvel should only be used before masculine nouns beginning with a vowel, which sort of rings a bell. "Shouldn't it be Shiloh Nouvelle, since she is a little girl?" they ask. I may not know much French, but I know it's never as bloody simple as that.
The real question is whether Shiloh is a masculine or feminine noun, and to know that, we must first know which Shiloh the child is called after. There is the Hebrew word, which means either "the peaceful one" or "the Messiah". Then there's the American civil war battle, named after the church in Tennessee around which Union troops made their fatefully under-fortified encampment. Battle and church are both feminine in French, but I'm not sure that matters. It is possible that Pitt and Jolie have, according to a system fashionable in celebrity circles, named the baby after the location of its conception, but this is not immediately enlightening: there are better than 50 Shilohs in the US (including six in Texas alone), none of which, to my knowledge, has presented itself to the Académie Française for gender assignment. There is also a movie called Shiloh about a cute runaway dog - male, I think, but I don't know the sex of the dog that played him."

I don't know why celebrities have to give their offspring stupid names - what would have been so wrong with Emma or Jane?

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