What Is In A Name?
Finding out your origins is fascinating stuff; it can even be life-changing…
If you’re not a paying member of Medium, click here to read this for free
I am an online Spanish tutor. Today´s interaction with my student based in Texas in the USA was more than fascinating. For him, it was life-changing…
After all, his last name is “Hinojos” of Spanish origin, which when translated means “fennel”. When he spelled out his last name during our lesson, I got to thinking, I had heard that last name before somewhere. I Googled it and remembered that I had tried that unusual vegetable before when I used to live in Argentina. Once I saw the image, I remembered how it tasted (I told him that to me it tasted like licorice, but the correct flavor is called “anise”).
He had told me in our first lesson that he had Mexican origins, to which I made an observation or recommendation that his last name might come from an agricultural source of farmers who harvested the “hinojo” which originally came from a certain region in Spain.
His face completely lit up as he responded with this, “That makes total sense to me!” I suggested that he get his DNA tested on one of those genealogy sites that determines our origins. He said he had already done that and had found out that his roots…
