What's in a freakin' name?

My sister, Peggy and I have a funny sort of relationship.

Much of it is drawn on the fact that we have this amazing ability to make each other laugh. Many times, if she and I are in the room together, we can be laughing at the most obscure thing, and anyone else in the room will be giving us the evil eye -- not exactly sure why that is, but I'm pretty confident it's because they are either jealous, or else they feel they've become the butt of our joke (sometimes -- IT'S TRUE!)

Peggy has a great blog site over at Blogger, and it was she who got me going on posting my random thoughts, musings and life's happenings on a regular basis. I'll admit though, she's much more devoted to it than I am. She has a talent for writing and she's a good girl too. Love ya, Piglet! Anyhow, one of her more recent blogs was a discussion on how people assume that her given name is Margaret when in reality it's just Peggy. She was wondering how these two names were connected -- and since she asked, it piqued my curiosity as well. So I did a little research, and I believe I have discovered how this all occurred. Peggy, you can blame the Scots for your troubles!

To begin with, the name Peggy is what is known as a "diminuative," or "nickname" and back in the day, diminuatives were only used to speak down to people or were created by adults to use on children to remind them of their place in society -- they were to be seen and not heard and they were required to 'earn' their adult status, thus breaking free of the nickname and being addressed in an adult fashion, using their proper, given name. Over time, however, these diminuatives became more terms of endearment rather than terms of social place.

Almost all diminuatives, though, are corrupted versions of the original given names, and the Scots were the most guilty of this practice. Funny as that seems, Margaret apparently is one given name that has a huge number of morphed versions. The more obvious ones would be Marge, Marta, Maggy or even Greta and Gretel. As it turns out, Maggie was created because in many instances, the 'r' after the first 'a' was often dropped, and in the case of Greta and Gretel, the entire "mar" was deleted.

Then a new 'rule' would develop later that, due to local accents within the Scottish countryside, is when the first 'a' in the name would evolve into an 'e' -- thus Maggie became Meggie or just Meg (which also morphed into Megan). Later the Brits and the Scots would add 'ette' or 'etta' to these diminuatives, so once again, Margaret evolved into Margaretta.

Then we have my sister's name. It turns out that the Anglo-Saxons began dropping or swapping letters in these nicknames -- so names like Henry changed to Hal, Mary turned into Molly and Dorothy into Dolly.

Thus, over time, several generations of Margaret had evolved to form Maggie to Meg to the now infamous Peg or Peggy or even Pegine.

So there you have it. Class dismissed.

And Peggy -- you will always be Piglet to me! (or is that Pigletta?) Smile!