Re: Snow Was: Smoking. Was: Clarke Award Finalists 2001

Robert Carnegie wrote:

On 26/06/2025 20:32, William Hyde wrote:

Paul S Person wrote:

On Thu, 26 Jun 2025 09:16:17 +0100, Robert Carnegie
<rja.carnegie@gmail.com> wrote:
>

On 24/06/2025 07:16, Titus G wrote:

On 20/06/25 14:38, Titus G wrote:

On 20/06/25 09:27, William Hyde wrote:

Titus G wrote:

snip

Vengeance was the fifth of his Quirke series. Copyright 2012. As well as
constant cigarette references, specific English brand names were used.

>

Just in case I did not previously recommend Banville's "Snow", let me do
so now.  It is a mystery, but not involving Quirke.

>
In Chapter 1, Senior Service cigarettes are smoked and later on the
Priest smoked Churchmans cigarettes which will be English or Irish
brands. In Chapter 3, the body is sent to pathologist Quirke, an in joke
as there is no further reference.
I really enjoy his prose. Thank you for the recommendation.

>
By the way, Churchman was a real cigarette
brand which doesn't appear to have religious
meaning, Wikipedia says that William Churchman's
pipe tobacco shop was opened in 1790.

>
Are you sure his name did not come from an ancestor being ... a Church
man? Just like "Smith" or "Miller" (among others).

>
Usually the name came from people who worked for the church but were not ordained, sextons, vergers, and so on.  At the time the name arose clerics were Catholic, and thus did not acknowledge their children.

 Without direct knowledge, I was about to suggest
that it has a meaning that is nothing to do with
any of that but was originally spelled differently
anyway.

Coincidences do happen.  Some names have no connection with their apparent meaning.  A name that circa 1200 sounded like "churchman", might have come to be pronounced that way in time.  Dorothy or Erilar could perhaps have given us a name for this process.
Names which were originally foreign get corrupted, and the tendency is for the corruption to move it to a recognizable word. "Churchman" in some cases could  conceivably come from some German or Flemish word ending in "mann" and starting with a "k" sound.
The great to the nth ancestor of my first Presbyterian minister came from Bohemia to Scotland circa 1620, for obvious reasons.  There being no chance of anyone, ever, getting the family name right, they went by "Slavik" forever more.  In this case, he was indeed Slavic, but he might well have been named "Churchman".  Or McIntyre, I suppose.
Other names have a meaning, but one which is not obvious to us today.
A person named "Bond" is not descended from a trader in or issuer of debt securities, but often from one of England's monarch's serfs.  These were freed long after most other serfs were, and were often named "bond" as people who had been in bondage.
   Such as, arbitrarily, someone who sells

oranges.  I don't know how you'd get "Churchman"
from that, but I'm confident that it's feasible.
In fact let me try: oranges are Spanish, therefore
Roman Catholic, so let's suppose that they were
called, hmm, church-apples in England - that'll do.
Even though I just made it up.
 To defend my original argument farther than is polite,
I asserted that the cigarette brand doesn't have
religious meaning.  Although, in your book, evidently
it does.

That's the way to bet it.  But I wouldn't say it is one hundred percent.
William Hyde