I think ranting against experimental names à la Moonshine Money is a rather short-sighted, from an onomastic point of view. If you look at the etymology of most names, most of them meant equally obvious and mundane things to the people who started to use them in their original language.
E.g. NAOTMAA:
Nicholas: People's Victory (Greek)
Alexandra: Men's Defender (Greek)
Olga: Sacred (Old Norse)
Tatiana: Unknown meaning, from a Roman surname.
Maria: Beloved, perhaps. (Semitic)
Anastasia: Resurrection (Greek)
Alexei: Help (Greek)
Would you have named your children Sacred, Resurrection and Help?
BTW I had never realized how pointed the meanings of the IF's individual names are, given their characteristics and fates. Perhaps
nomen est omen after all?
Speaking of names, but of noble surnames:
Are there anybody else who thinks the mad Russian Civil War figure Baron Roman von Ungern-Sternberg showed good taste when he quite incorrectly adopted the form Baron Roman
Ungern von Sternberg? Anybody else who thinks double-barrelled noble names sound too bourgeois, modern and too little feudal: E.g. that Count Danneskiold of Samsøe sounds better than Count Danneskiold-Samsøe?
And which country has the coolest noble names? Anyone who agrees that the:
- Spanish (e.g. de Villanova), German (e.g. von Neudorf) and French (e.g. de Neuville) ones are too boringly obvious, although the French ones do well in Anglo-Norman disguise (e.g. Neville)?
- That the British, Italian and Russian aristocracies had shockingly common and nondescript names in many instances, not at all distinguishable from commoners?
- That perhaps the best noble surnames are the ornamental surnames of the Scandinavian nobility derived from canting arms? E.g. Pistolkors of Romanov fame?
The name means "pistol cross" in Swedish.
Which came first, the name or the arms?
Probably at the same time - in 1645, when Queen Kristina of Sweden ennobled the Lieutenant Jöran Olufsson of the Karelian Cavalry. He, like so many Scandinavians ennobled by letters patent, obviously emulated the "armorially derived surname" of the ancient Scandinavian noble families like Vasa, Oxenstierna, Rosenkrantz, Gyldenstierna, Gyldenløve, Gedde, Banér, Bielke, Sparre, Stenbock, Natt och Dag, Leijonhuvud etc. But simultaneously he needed canting arms to derive that surname from!
In Scandinavia (particularly Norway and Denmark) where so many people have farm names as surname, territorial surnames (or titles) are not much used by the nobility, in stark contrast to both Britain, but especially France and Germany. But unlike in Russia (and Britain), any surname can't be seen as noble, they are usually either foreign (mostly German, e.g. Wedell, Von Essen) or "ornamental surnames" derived or pseudo-derived from arms, like Pistolkors. Often with the connection to heraldry being explicitly mentioned, as in Danneskiold, Danish Shield, whose arms are a variation on the arms of Denmark.
Most non-Scandinavians would probably associate these types of surnames with Jewishness, e.g. Rothschild (Red Shield) and Goldenblatt (Golden Leaf).
