Comment by Cthulhu_
1 year ago
Fun fact, anyone with a surname that ends with the -stra or -sma suffix has their origins in Frisia [0], a region in current-day Netherlands and Germany that retained their independence in the Roman era. Terpstra specifically refers to someone living on a terp, an artificial hill (because there's no hills in the Netherlands lololol) that people would live on or retreat to with the intermittent floodings.
This in turn is why the Netherlands is so big when it comes to dairy and cheese; grass was one of the few things that would grow consistently and survive the floods, cows eat grass, cheese and butter can be preserved to last through winter, etc.
And you will forever have your name mispronounced by English speakers that can’t wrap their tongues around the -sma or -stra ending.
Things like TerpSON, TerpSmith, Terp….
One time while voting the lady working there butchered my name 8 times, she literally could not get it right.
To be fair to an English speaker reading your name from paper: some native English speakers are taught to read by recognizing words by their first letter and their shape, and skipping the word to later fill in the blanks when they don't recognize the word. The lady may have simply never been taught how to sound out unfamiliar letter combinations, and may have been trying her best to make sense of the unrecognizable mess of letters she saw in front of her.
https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
Oh gosh, this explains so much.
I always felt that many native English speakers can't really parse a text properly. They seem to react to certain keywords. When the text says something they didn't expect, they often miss it or get confused.
I thought it might be a side-effect of being monolingual and hence having a less explicit understanding of language but seeing how they are taught to read, things make perfectly sense.
It is crazy of much staying power bogus science has in education. Reminds me how the idea of individual learning styles is still popular and though it lacks empirical evidence.
She wasn't even reading it, I was telling her my name, all she had to do was repeat it and she couldn't do it.
1 reply →
And the 13-episode podcast from them: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
Can confirm, usually misunderstood too.
> she literally could not get it right
Eh, they get their revenge. As any Australian of a certain age can tell you TelSTRA could not get it right, for any value of right, without expending an equivalent effort to moving a mountain.
Very interesting. The only Terpstra I knew of before this link was Niki Terpstra, one of only three Dutch winners of both Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders.
I also recall one Brett Terpstra, maker of Marked app and kind of a known name in the indie Mac developer scene
I thought this was him debuting a new project.
Another fun fact, from Wikipedia, the name Frisia "stems from Latin Frisii, an ethnonym used for a group of ancient tribes in modern-day Northwestern Germany, possibly being a loanword of Proto-Germanic *frisaz, meaning "curly, crisp", presumably referring to the hair of the tribesmen."
In German Frisur, and in south slavic languages Фризура, means hairstyle, which is also related to the english word Frizz
Dijkstra!
I think this is a reference to the muse Terpsichore, though?
We also have at least one -stra river in Norway, Vinstra. Don't know if anyone has it as last name, though.