This time we visit the fascinating origin of the names of one of Canada ’s greatest artists, Veronica Tennant, born in 1946. Her great technique and intensity made the ballerina one of the greatest stars in the history of the National Ballet of Canada. The marvelous photograph of Veronica Tennant above is the work of David Street for The National Ballet of Canada Archives. VERONICA The popularity of Veronica as a female given name is due to Saint Veronica, a woman of Jerusalem whom pious legend states stood along the via dolorosa and took pity on Jesus and his suffering as he was led to his crucifixion. Veronica stooped down and wiped Christ’s sweating brow with her veil. Later she noticed that the cloth now bore a true image of the face of Christ. At St. Peter’s in Rome such a cloth, claimed to be the original veil of St. Veronica, may be seen among the holy relics in the Vatican collection. July 12 is St. Veronica’s feast day, and girls born on this date are sometimes baptized with the name in the Russian Orthodox, Greek Orthodox, or Roman Catholic churches. One standard but dubious etymology of Veronica arises from this story, and is the origin found in many, poorly researched “names-for-your-baby” books. Monkish folk etymology posits that the name is a contraction of the Latin phrase vera iconica meaning ‘true image,’ from the same Greek root that gives us the word for a religious painting, icon. Such a derivation is linguistically unlikely.
Canaletto's "Verona Seen From The Ponte Nuovo," 1746 Much more probable is the derivation of Veronica from a medieval Latin adjective veronicus that meant ‘a person from the Italian city of Verona.’ Veronica would mean a woman of Verona , a suitable name for a girl because the women of that city were considered to be among the most beautiful in all of medieval Italy . Shakespeare places Romeo and Juliet “in fair Verona where we lay our scene.” But Verona also claimed to possess the veil of St. Veronica at one point during the Renaissance! Sixteenth-century Italian referred to this as la veletta veronica ‘the Veronese veil.’ This, I believe, is the origin of the feminine first name. Véronique is the French spelling. In some Slavic tongues, it is Veronika or Beronika. The fact that one of the Catholic Stations of the Cross commemorates St. Veronica’s kindness to the suffering Jesus insures the name’s continued popularity in all languages of the western world. Another doubtful source of the given name Veronica is the female first name Berenice (often shortened to Bernice), originally a Macedonian form of the Greek Pherenike ‘bringer of victory.’ The vowel shiftings and interlingual gradations necessary to support this bizarre transformation may happen on Mars, but have not so far occurred on earth, except in the frantic noggins of certain desperate etymologists.
THE SURNAME TENNANT Tennant as an English surname originates as tenant. A putative ancestor might have been called John the tenant, a man who held land in one of various forms of feudal tenure. In form, it’s tenant, a Norman French participial form from tenir ‘to hold.’ By the end of the period of Middle English, about A.D. 1500, when some British surnames had assumed their final form, tenancy came to refer to renting a piece of land for a specified time by lease. The spelling Tennant is not, of course, an attempt to disguise the fact that the founding ancestor did not own any land outright. It merely reflects how variable English spelling was, before the rise of dictionaries and widespread literacy combined to regularize orthography. The surname appears as Tennant, Tennent, Tennents. Tennant is common in Yorkshire and southern Scotland.
© 2006 William Gordon Casselman
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Veronica origin of the given name Tennant origin of the surname Veronica: a new origin of the given name |
