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Shania Twain sexy photo and biography

ISBN 1-55278-141-0 250 pages

published by McArthur & Company

Available at book stores across Canada and online here.

Canadian names come from all over the world

and have fascinating meanings.

Check these names out!

Shania Twain - Shania means ‘on my way’ in the Ojibwa language.

Eileen “Shania” Twain 1965–

The million-CD-selling country-and-western singer-composer grew up in Timmins, Ontario, as Eileen Twain and got her start singing at Ontario’s Deerhurst Inn. She has won many awards for her work, for example, Junos, Country Music Awards, and Grammies. Her first CD The Woman in Me (1995) has sold more than eleven million copies. Her 1997 CD Come On Over was also a smash hit.

Her adoptive father, Jerry Twain, is full-blooded Ojibway. Shania was the name of a girl she worked with at the Deerhurst Inn, and, when it came time to confect a show-biz name, she changed it to Shania (pronounced sha-NYE-a) which is Ojibwa for ‘ on my way.’

There seems to be no mention of Twain as a surname in print until the American satirist Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835–1910) used it as his pseudonym and called himself Mark Twain based on the shout of a Mississippi riverboat deckhand who called out water depth from a sounding line sunk in the turbid waters of the river. When the line showed a depth of two fathoms, the mate shouted out to the pilot of the boat, “Mark twain!” that is, the mark is twain, i.e., ‘two.’ Twain is listed in some dialect dictionaries as a local pronunciation of Dwayne.

Mike Bullard - His surname means ‘slick trickster’ from Middle English boule ‘deceit.’

Alcock - No, it’s not every high-school boy’s fantasy state. It really means ‘Little Alan.’

Scarborough - Toronto has its Scarborough Bluffs. Scarborough means ‘Harelip’s Fort.’

Wagstaff - This began as the nickname of a pompous beadle like Mr. Bumble in Oliver Twist. It’s the same naming style (verb-object) that we see in the surnames Shakespeare and Turnbull (literally, strong enough to turn aside a charging bull).

Portrait of George Noel Gordon, Lord Byron, in Albanian dress, painted by Thomas Phillips in 1813

Byron - Sooo upper-crust with its later adjective Byronic. But originally it’s Byrom from Old English byrum ‘at the cowsheds,’ suggesting a somewhat modest ancestral origin.

 

"Names have to be appropriate. Therefore I spend a lot of time reading up on the meanings of names, in books like Name Your Baby."

                                                                          — Margaret Atwood

Canada's most famous novelist is discussing in the passage quoted above how she selects characters' names in an interview from Margaret Atwood: Conversations, 1990.

Why should you read a book about where names come from? Well, you've got a name or two yourself, right? What does your last name mean? Nothing? Wrong! Every name, first, middle, or last, began with meaningful roots and has a story to tell that will delight and startle you. The next page presents one intriguing example by the name of Bryan Adams.

Upon contemplating a book whose subtitle contains the phrase "Canadian Surnames," one quibble may dribble into the mind of the professional fussbudget. In fact, a fussbudget might squawk like a berserk parrot. My own eardrums have rung in the company of that more erratic sort of academic pest. Well, all ye tenured lads and lassies who scamper through the subsidized halls of envy-er-ivy, relax, gulp a Prozac, and apply a Tensor to your throbbing doctorate.

How, you may ask, can any surname be called Canadian except perhaps those of aboriginal peoples? Certainly Inuit and Cree and Ojibwa names were the first ones heard across the land that would become Canada, and you will discover the origins of fascinating First Nations names throughout my name book. Consider pop singer Shania Twain, whose aboriginal first name is Ojibwa for "on my way."

But surnames from all over the earth are Canadian too, brought here by immigrants speaking many languages. If you had tried telling my late Scottish grandmother Gordon that her family, almost two hundred years on this land that would become Ontario, if you had even hinted that Gordon, her married name, and Munro, her maiden name, were not Canadian surnames, albeit Scottish in origin—well! you would have had an argument, if not a dour look, if not a broom slap across your impudent arse!

The reader will find surnames of many languages explained in my Canadian name book, including examples from Arabic, Armenian, Blackfoot, Chinese, Cree, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Icelandic, Inuktitut, Iranian, Irish, Italian, Polish, Punjabi, Russian, Scottish Gaelic, Slovakian, Spanish, Stoney, Ukrainian, Welsh, and Wendat.

Now, many books list the meaning of last names and devote one line to each individual name. Such volumes of reference are fine-for their purpose. But they seldom get into the nitty-gritty of onomastics, that is, the reason last names mean what they mean, how precisely last names began, how each language has differing rules for the kinds of words that may become part of its stock of naming words. Here I do try to tell you what's in a name. For any reader interested in genealogy and surnames, the introduction gives a colourful and amusing overview of how English surnames arose. Then the main part of the book examines individual surnames of famous Canadians.

The names we inherit at birth are the most personal gifts life offers. Yet how many of us know much at all about their meaning? Even if we don't know the original sense of our family name, it is still precious, personal, and not to be defiled by coarse lips.

I recall the sting of a taunt by a Grade 5 classmate who called me "Cat's-ass-elman." The same Torquemada-in-training then tiptoed after me around the recess yard, singsonging "Silly Billy. Silly Billy. Silly Billy." An iced snowball fired at his protuberant mandibular region caused him to reconsider singsong as a career. He remained a bully as an adult. Twenty-seven years later—I'm sad to report—a large transport truck brought his inquisitorial potential to a pulpy end.

Don't mess with my name! And so say all of us. Names have a ritual sanctity that is made plain at baptism. Yes, they are just labels. But they label both the outer, physical us and the inner, proprioceptively tuned us. Over the years as we acquire an experienced and self-created character, our names come to share our mystical and inviolable aura of selfhood. Therefore in this little study no name is mocked. Oh, there's fun and enlightenment and astonishment galore in the story of Canadian surnames. But I make fun with names, not of names.

Not everyone likes the names glued on at birth. Canadian media guru Marshall McLuhan disliked his own names intensely and said, in his 1964 book Understanding Media, "The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers."

Marshall McLuhan: The Medium and the Messenger

by Philip Marchand, revised edition: MIT Press, 1998,

ISBN 0-262-63186-5

For me, this is the best summary to date of McLuhan's thought and of his life.

 

Then there are people who find the names of others loathsome. Shakespeare has a deft reply for them in As You Like It:

Jaques: I do not like her name.

Orlando: There was no thought of pleasing you when she was christened.

If you do not like the names I have chosen or indeed find your own name odious, as apparently Marshall McLuhan did, I can only conclude this little intro by quoting Groucho Marx. The great American comedian was once asked if Groucho were his real name. "No," replied Marx, "I'm breaking it in for a friend."

 

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