Earlier this year the red-tops, as we must learn to call tabloid papers, became very excited about wee Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes’s daughter’s name. It was Suri, you may remember, and the Sun newspaper went as far as to slap an ‘exclusive’ label on a thoughtful article pointing out that the name did not mean ‘princess’ in Hebrew, as the parents suggested, but was a designation of the Lord Krishna in Hindi.
Now I’ve caught up with the name that Nelly Furtado has given her own little daughter. Nelly Furtado, aged 27, is, as you must know, today’s most successful Portuguese–Canadian singer. She was named after Nellie Kim, the Soviet gymnast who rivalled Nadia Comaneci in the 1976 Olympics. Nelly, not to be outdone, has called her daughter Nevis.
‘She isn’t named after the big mountain,’ explained Rick Fulton in the Scottish Daily Record, ‘but from the Latin word nevi, meaning a mole.’ The Latin word in question, naevus (rendered nevus in American English), forms a plural of naevi. So little Nevis probably has moles a-plenty, what with the extra ‘s’ on the end.
Still, there is that tiny island state, St Kitts and Nevis, to be borne in mind. The latter was formerly called Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, ‘Our Lady of the Snows’. This avocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary comes from the Roman basilica of St Mary Major (Sancta Maria ad Nives in Latin), the building of which, pious legend tells, was prompted by a fall of snow in August on the Esquiline hill. Nieves, in consequence, is a girls’ name in Spanish and, in Portuguese, Neves.
Nelly Furtado used to sing folky songs about dicky-birds. Now it’s R&B, hip-hop and dance numbers. Orthography doesn’t get much of a look-in.
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