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Bryan Adams
The Canadian superstar rock singer and composer was born in Kingston, Ontario. Probably his most popular song is "Everything I Do, I Do It for You." The music video of his 1998 hit "A Day Like Today" is considered one of the best rock videos ever made in Canada. In 1999, adding another quiver to his bow, Adams published a very popular book of his own startling and evocative photographs of women, famous and not, titled Made in Canada.
The majority of English surnames are based on the first name of the founding male ancestor of the family. Yes, it was oinky and chauvinistic of those frowsy Saxons to deprecate female names, but, shall we revise history? No, herstory won't work as one peruses the rise of surnames.
As we might expect, Adams was in medieval English a genitive form, Adames 'of Adam.' This could be appended in a parish registry to a first name like John, so that John Adames would mean John, son of a man named Adam. But note that it could also commonly refer to anyone of the household of a man named Adam. If that Adam had servants, his underlings' newborn children could be baptized with their master's name. So Adams can also mean 'servant of Adam.'
If a family wished to make clear that the child being baptized was a legitimate heir of the founding ancestor, the relationship was stated plainly by putting "Adam's son" after the first name, so that John, Adam's son would become in time John Adamson.
McAdam, the pioneer of modern road-building
In Scotland, MacAdam was the form, and one of that name, a surveyor, John Loudon McAdam (1756-1836) helped pave the way for better roads by suggesting many layers of broken stone as a roadbed. He also gave us a verb "to macadamize."
Another illustrious bearer of the name was John Macadam, a Scottish chemist, after whom is named the Australian tree whose fruit we eat as macadamia nuts.
John Macadam, Esquire, M.D. (1827 - 1865) A young Scots immigrant scientist, philosopher, and politician who did much in his few years in Australia.
Spelling did not become standardized in England until the spread of dictionaries and general literacy. So variant forms of the surname appear as Addams, Adems, and Adhams.
Sometimes the founding ancestor's pet name, often a diminutive form, was the origin of the surname. Pet names for Adam in medieval English included Addy, Ade, Adcock, Adekin, and Adnett. These pet names produced a profusion of Adam-based surnames that include Adcocks, Addey, Addis, Haddy, Addison, Addyman, Ades, Adey, Adkins, Atkins, Adnitt, and so forth.
There is an Irish-Gaelic diminutive form, too, that appears in the name of the eighth-century Irish St. Adamnan, 'Little Adam.'
The majority of first names in all countries of Christendom were taken from the names of Christian saints, often by legal enforcement. For example, in 1563 the Council of Trent decreed that children baptized in the Roman Catholic Church must be given names that appear in the Catholic calendar of saints' names. This stricture was made to combat the then-growing Protestant habit of using Old Testament names.
What the anti-Semitic Council of Trent was actually in a racist tizzy about, of course, was the fact that most Old Testament names were Hebrew, and Rome did not want the entire population of Europe tagged with Jewish names. Well, this may be a goyishe welt, but that ploy didn't work. A very large percentage of all first and last names in every language of Europe can be traced back to Hebrew originals in the Old and New Testament. Thus failed one bit of papal anti-Semitism.
And so it behooves any bearer of the name Adam or Adams to know just what the name of the first man means in Hebrew.
A modern Russian Orthodox 'Creation' based on medieval icon painting
One striking feature of the Adam and Eve creation myth in Genesis is the pottery metaphor: a god formed humans from clay. This is a worldwide element in creation stories. Compare the Hebrew and Christian version in Genesis 2:6, 7 as translated in the King James version of 1611: "There went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground. . ."
So, even today, in brickyards of the Middle East, does the brick maker sprinkle water on the clay before he kneads it into shape. The Bible's name for the first man reflects this too. Adam means 'human being, person.' With only a slightly different voicing, adom means 'red.' Both may be related to Hebrew adamah 'clay' or 'red earth of Israel.'
In Old Testament Hebrew it is usually ha adam and the definite article makes some scholars suspect that the name, like some others in Hebrew, was very early borrowed from neighbouring Assyrians. If so, it might stem from Assyrian adamu 'to make or produce.' Thus Adam would mean 'the made one, the created one.'
The ultimately Latin word 'human' also reflects this pottery myth in creation stories. The prime meaning of Latin humanus is 'clayey' or made of humus 'earth, soil, clay.' The Roman word for human being or man, homo, as in our species Homo sapiens, also stems from the same root. In Old Latin it was hemo 'the earthen one' or 'the person of clay.' The idea must have occurred early in human history, when primitive humans first dug up an interred body to discover bones and dust. Dust thou art; to dust shalt thou return.
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