churchill onomastics
Take, for instance, Churchill Baptist. It's a church on a hill, and it's named Churchill. Of course, it's not named that because it's on a hill. It's named that because that general area of town has lots of neighborhoods and businesses named Churchill, and the reason for that is that the school district named its schools after great war leaders (MacArthur, Eisenhower, Bradley, ...Lee). So, I went to Churchill High School.
Surnames arose in the Middle Ages, when there began to be too many people around to simply have "John the Butcher." (By the way, German Jews have a particularly colorful surname history because of their refusal to take surnames at first. That's a story for a different day.) They then took names from their professions (Miller, Cook), or their fathers (Johnson), or their hometowns (Churchill, in Oxfordshire).
So, what we've got here is a church on a hill, named Churchill, after a school that's named after Winston Churchill, whose name traces, generations back, to a town, which is named after — a church on a hill.
Surnames arose in the Middle Ages, when there began to be too many people around to simply have "John the Butcher." (By the way, German Jews have a particularly colorful surname history because of their refusal to take surnames at first. That's a story for a different day.) They then took names from their professions (Miller, Cook), or their fathers (Johnson), or their hometowns (Churchill, in Oxfordshire).
So, what we've got here is a church on a hill, named Churchill, after a school that's named after Winston Churchill, whose name traces, generations back, to a town, which is named after — a church on a hill.
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