My great-great-grandfather fathered 17 children with three wives in succession. He moved from South Carolina to Alabama around 1845 with wife #1. She died; he married my great-great-grandmother.
She
died, sometime in the late 1850's, IIRC. He then married wife #3, fathered his last few children, and circa 1863 decided it'd be a great lark to go be a soldier despite the fact he was at least in his mid-40's by then, and had the 17 kids. So he runs off and joins the army, leaving my step-great-great with the menagerie, though I'm assuming the oldest were grown and on their own by then.
She divorced him.
Good for her.
I used to work with a girl who had more than a hundred first cousins. Seriously. It's a thing.
This conversation somehow reminded me of a youthful exercise in pedantry.
My junior year in high school, our school play was
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
The brothers were named Adam, Benjamin, Caleb, Daniel, Ephraim, Frank, and Gideon, and it scares me that I remember that. I don't remember my own character's name, just that I was Ephraim's bride.
Anyway, the heroine of the play, upon marrying Adam spur-of-the-moment, going home with him, and discovering she's to keep house for not one but seven men, comments upon their fine-sounding Bible names, except that she doesn't remember a Frank in the Bible. A brother responds, "Tweren't no F names in the Bible, so Ma named him Frankincense 'cuz he smelled so sweet."
(WHY do I remember lines from a play I was in in 1988? This is scary.)
Pedant that I am, something struck me as Not Quite Right, so I went home and got out my parents' Bible concordance and confirmed that there were, at the least, a Felix and a Festus to be found in the Bible.
Remarking upon this to my drama classmates did not improve my popularity and coolness.
I know Jinger. But it it J as in jump, and inger as in ... ing(the verb tense)-er. She's chinese.
-t, my heartfelt sympathies. My wish is you only get happy surprises and find your feet firm on the ground.
Okay, it's actually better that the 16th one has a J-name, too.
Whew. I was feeling badly for the littlest misfit in that family. Now I think I'll just say, "Eeeeeew."
Here I was hoping for news re: mom post-surgery. I'll be thinking of you guys...
That dress refund lady: may all those clothes she's going to buy smell kinda garbagey, like her stinkin' aura. May she get dumped on her birthday. May she suffer from an impromptu bodily noise very soon. The noive of some people, pfei.
Finally heard from the hospital. My mom's nurse called because my mom's throat is messed up from being intubated. The surgery went fine and I'll know more tomorrow. But she is back in her room and doing ok.
Oh! Is Jinger supposed to be pronounced "Ginger"?? Oh.
Yep, Jinger=Ginger. Methinks if they had to mess with the spelling, they could've made the pronunciation a lot clearer by going all the way and making it Jinjer.
they could've made the pronunciation a lot clearer by going all the way and making it Jinjer
Or Jinjur, which actually has a tiny thread of literary precedence, being the name of a rather cool girl general in the army of the Land of Oz in one of the later books.
Susan, I was reading through your description of your 7 Brides pedantry and nodnodnodding. I was exactly that pedant (though not with exactly that show). Fortunately, I was at a performing arts high school crammed to the gills with band and dance and theater geeks so nobody's pedantry was ever a problem, but if I'd gone to the shiny little well-funded sleek suburban school everyone expected me to go to, they would've cut me to ribbons.
IONameN, today in past medical records I came across a girl named Emiliee. What the hell? iee isn't a name suffix, it's a cartoon sound for a big cartoon man screaming like a little girl. Everybody knows that.
There was a baby at my mother's church named Emileigh.
