What's in my name?

For almost two thousand years, Europeans believed that all languages came from the language in which God first spoke to Adam and in which Adam named everything and which all the inhabitants of the Earth spoke until God exploded it at Babel. All of our words were therefore believed to have a direct relationship to some ultimate reality and to consequently contain mystical powers. Today, language is probably understood a bit more clearly as simply a tool developed by people living in close proximity to one another so that they might communicate things they would care to communicate. However…

What’s in a name? Take my mother-in-law. She is a very sweet lady and was once a great beauty.  She is now a real estate agent and true to some negative stereotypes of the profession, can be a bit...detached from reality.  (She is nevertheless not unsuccessful.) Now, most peoples names mean something insightful or endearing such as a personal quality to live up to, but Beverly, Beverly is Old English for approximately the 'fertile land of the beavers'[1]. Somehow, a better name could not exist for the big-hearted space-cadet that is my mother-in-law. But on to me:

Daniel is Hebrew for "God is my judge". Umlauf is German (of which I know a little) consisting of “um” - roughly ‘around’ - and "lauf" from the laufen, the verb ‘to run’ or ‘be in swift motion’. Taken together, "umlauf" refers to the concept of the completion of an orbit by a planet or a single run through the entire circulatory system by a blood cell.  By the by, if anyone who knows German better than I ever reads this, please critique my analysis.

I like my name and believe that it fits me incredibly well. To begin with, when I was a little boy, I named my favorite stuffed purple monkey and all my pound puppies Daniel and was pretty disappointed at my younger brothers births when I was informed he was not to be name Daniel. “God is my judge” has been a kind of mode of being for me ever since I can remember. It is not that I do not care about others opinions or that I am not aware of them but simply that they are not a priority in the way I think about things.

I am the type of person who can and likes to consume large amounts of information.  Rather than allowing this information to influence my way of thinking, I hold it in my mind at arm's length and draw on it when it suits my thought-life.  I often here people exclaiming the days news in a way which indicates their view of the matter has been completely subsumed by the view of their particular news source.  My mind simply does not integrate sensory information that way.  

To sum up, Umlauf is an awesome last name. I do not even really comprehend its full meaning but I know I like the idea of a successful planned trip and it seems to bring some finality. With that, I encourage everyone to delve into the finer definitions of their name and find out how well it fits them and see if names and language really do have any sort of connection to a deeper reality…

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[1] I should point out here that this is my own translation. A few different website translated it into such phrases as field or meadow of beavers or stream of beavers.