S. Worthen | Weblog

Yes! Especially on 7 hour flights in a captive space.

Where my name comes from? At the semi-academic lunch, I had the usual inattentive response from one person presuming it was an Irish name. (It's Yiddish.) Another, knowing it was Yiddish, started singing me a song I'd actually not heard before which involves it. (In Yiddish, my first name is merely vocabulary, you see.) The most intriguing was the elderly woman who was struck by my first and last name together, something which has never happened to me. She wondered if I knew where my last name came from. (It's a village near Chester.) She was particularly struck by the fact my first name is Jewish and my last name is English (and therefore, presumably, Christian.) Of course, I have a Yiddish first name and English last name for rather mundane reasons - my mother is of Jewish descent, and my father is of English Protestant descent.

Actually, my favorite part about my name is that I was named after my great-great grandmother Jenny. You'll notice Jenny isn't actually my name though....