Spanish King Shoots Drunk Bear
When the Spanish King visited Russia recently he was taken on a bear hunt. But apparently "hunt organizers, keen to make the King of Spain's chances of killing a bear easier, provided a tame one drunk on vodka." Sad. But the last paragraph of the story is even more pathetic: "Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev had trouble with his aim in his later years. Some of the animals he liked to stalk were either tied to trees or plied with booze." (Thanks, Big Gary)
Ich Vergessen
Here's an urban legend I'd never heard before: "German immigrants arriving at Ellis Island were asked their names, and might respond 'Ich vergessen,' meaning 'I forgot,' if they couldn't understand English. The officials would then mark down that the name was 'Ferguson.'" This doesn't make any sense to me at all. The German and English words for 'name' are almost identical, so I think German immigrants in particular would be able to understand a request for their name. But even if they didn't, why would they respond 'I forget'?
Top 10 Best Ghost Photographs Ever
The Brown Lady of Raynham comes in at #10. (Thanks, Kathy)
Comments
This is an urban legend obviously, and one that's easily debunked too.
The hunting thing is sad.
Be that as it may, it seems that most, if not all, of the legends and family traditions about names being changed at Ellis Island are false. I visited the Ellis Island Museum a couple of years ago, and the curators there said they have been looking for instances of such capricious name changes, but have never found a verifiable example of it. The clerks at Ellis Island were provided with passenger manifests from the arriving ships and just checked off the names as they interviewed the immigrants. So in cases where names were written wrong, it more likely happened on the other side of the Atlantic. Also, Ellis Island employed a large translator corps, and in most cases the translators were native speakers of the immigrants' languages.
However, many immigrants did change or simplify or Anglicize their names at some point in their assimilation to America, for a wide variety of reasons. Since "Ellis Island" symbolically referred to the whole experience of arrival in America, later generations frequently referred to such name changes as having happened "at Ellis Island."
Oddly enough, I have a friend whose last name is Ferguson, although her heritage is Greek on her father's side and Hungarian on her mother's. I asked her how she came to be named "Ferguson," and she said that roughly a century ago in Greece there was a huge fad for using Irish names. Her father's family had a name that sounded a lot like "Ferguson" (unfortunately, I don't remember their Greek name), so they started spelling and pronouncing it "Ferguson." In this case, the name change was an intentional decision inspired by a desire to be trendy. They did this in Greece, even before some of them immigrated to America. Improbable, but apparently true.
Nick used to go by Nicholas, but I knew him long before that when he was just Penniless.
What with inflation, in the '90s he was Quarterless, but eventually found a home.
And on the drunk bear, remember the legend of Teddy's Bear. It's been happening for decades.