Posted on 02/07/2005 8:31:26 PM PST by franksolich
Orchard owner plucks out new name
An ambitious young man seeking a tourism-related future around an apple orchard in Sogn applied to change his name to "Eplet," which means "the apple" in Norwegian. He was prepared to defend his choice, but it wasn't necessary.
Instead, it only took Trond Henrik Lie-Andreassen around three hours at the local registry office in Sogndal to complete the name-change formalities, reported newspaper VG.
"If the authorities put up a challenge, I was ready to argue that lots of Norwegians are named Gran, (which means 'fir,' as in the tree, in Norwegian)," Lie-Andreassen said.
Lie-Andreassen, age 29, recently moved to a small farm in Sogn with about 30 apple trees in its orchard. He plans to offer accommodation for tourists, and wanted a name that would be easy for them to remember.
His new name also reflects a key product of his farm, on which Trond Henrik Eplet also hopes to capitalize.
"Eplet" roughly resembles "apple" (if one has a great deal of imagination), which coincidentally is one of the oldest words in English still in current use (others include "gold" and "bad").
One wonders if the eplet came before apple, or if apple came before the eplet.
"Ping" for the "Norway ping list."
Mondays must be a slow news day in Norway, the Nebraska of Europe.
either that or they ran out of Aquavit
I see nothing wrong with this apple-lation.
Obviously a much simpler life there.
One side of my family must have gotten the name from raising hogs. Surnames seem odd. Where you lived; what you did; or who knows...surnames came from that. That's what I learned, anyway. Names ending with son were different after the surnames got used up, I guess.
Hard to know.
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