To be born with an odd or funny-sounding name seems at first like a curse, but for the strong and irony-minded it turns into a blessing. My paternal grandfather, whom I never knew, probably didn’t look at it that way. When he emigrated from Poland early in the twentieth century, his surname was Kurpiewski, an ungainly mouthful for most Americans. Late in the teens, after serving in the U.S. Army in Europe, he shortened the name to Kurp, a mere four letters, and yet it’s remarkable how often the word is misspelled and mispronounced. I’ve often been mistaken for an heir to the German arms manufacturing fortune. Nor do I make espresso machines.
We learned early as kids that
Kurp rhymes with burp. And the not-unrelated slurp. And chirp
and usurp. Nothing flattering. Later, we added Earp (as in Wyatt and
Virgil) to the poetic stockpile. KURP looks like a radio station’s call letters.
It’s a blunt name suited for hollering, as by a drill instructor. My middle son
came up with Kurpelicious to
describe toothsome foodstuffs, and his boarding-school friends coined Kurpies
(rhymes with herpes). Last week, in the Albany, N.Y., airport, my oldest
son met a female Kurp whose daughter is the assonantly named Katie Kurp. (Nice
to meet you, Katie! Be strong.) The effect of all this linguistic vulnerability
is to make Kurps proud and secure in their inheritance.
Thanks to John David
Cochran, a Marine Corps veteran and convict, I’ve learned there’s even more
rhyming fun to be had. In the summer 2021 issue of The Threepenny Review
you’ll find his essay titled “Gurp.” His etymology of the word is rather
involved and Kurpeliciously distasteful, but worth reading. Let him explain:
“Leaving the pill line,
inmates are required to open their mouths, lift their tongues, and run their
fingers around their gums while a guard examines with a flashlight. Makes it
tough to hide a pill. The solution: swallow the pill and don’t take any water with
it. After leaving the pill line and making it several feet around the corner of
the building . . . gurp . . . up comes the pill. They puke it out.”
3 comments:
One moniker that I remember from my high school days: Romolo Lipple. (No one laughed, at least not in his presence. He was BIG.)
One of my most treasured books is John Train's Most Remarkable Names. From the cover alone: Sistine Madonna McClung, Genghis Cohen, Theodolphus J. Poontang, Badman Trouble.
Having an odd or funny-sounding last name, as I do, does require a certain ironical toughness to cope with the stale jokes, the slurs, and the inanities one hears. My ancestors, the Guirlande family, came to America from France in the 1700s and, as did many, chopped off the end of their name, making it Guirl. Johnny Cash's 'Boy Named Sue' is our family theme song.
'Later we added Earp (as in Wyatt and Virgil)'. Don’t forget Thomas Wade Earp (1895-1958), poet, art critic, and translator of Stendhal’s ‘Memoirs of an Egotist’. The sometime painter D. H. Lawrence wasn’t amused by Earp's strictures and retaliated in ‘More Pansies’ (1932):
I heard a little chicken chirp:
My name is Thomas, Thomas Earp!
And I can neither paint nor write,
I only can set other people right.
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