On the Oddity of Dutch Surnames

Via Mental_floss:

When Napoleon seized the Netherlands in 1810, he demanded that all Dutchmen take last names, just as the French had done decades prior. Problem was, the Dutch had lived full and happy lives with single names, so they took absurd surnames in a show of spirited defiance. These included Naaktgeboren (born naked), Spring int Veld (jump in the field), and Piest (pisses). Unfortunately for their descendants, Napoleon’s last-name trend stuck, and all of these remain perfectly normal Dutch names today.

Hahah nice! In fact, though, this is not the first time I'd heard this story. A blogger named Steve Den Beste told a similar story about his name a few years back:

A lot of people ask me about my surname. There's an interesting story behind it.

It doesn't go back very far, actually. Because there's no aristocracy in the US, people like to pretend that they're descended from the nobility in Europe. (In actual practice, for most of them if they actually had an honest crest at all, it would bear the bar sinister!)

Not me. My ancestry is Dutch (Frisian) and I come from a long line of farmers and pirates. My ancestry is strictly common, and historically the commoners in Frisia didn't have surnames. Only the nobles had surnames; the rest of us were named things like "Johann with the twisted lip" or "Blue-eyed Hans".

Until, that is, the French invaded the place and ran it during the Napoleonic wars for about 7 years. Now Napoleon was really big on taxing the provinces so he could keep the taxes back in France low. The countries he conquered all had to pony up bigtime to pay him for the privilege of having been conquered by him. So the French called everyone in the Netherlands in and required them to pick surnames, I assume so that an accurate census could be made, so that they could tax the place better.

Well! Surnames for commoners! What a stupid idea! And it's these silly French invaders making us do this. They've got all the guns, but they can't make us take it seriously, now can they?

So a bunch of the people made up facetious or otherwise strange names. What they didn't expect was that after the war, when the French were kicked back out again, that the Dutch government would keep those names for everyone.

There are a number of people living in the Netherlands whose surname is Poepjes, which translated into English means "little pieces of shit".

My paternal ancestor was also a smartass, but at least he had better taste. My surname means "The Best" in not only Dutch but also in several Scandanavian languages which are in the Germanic group.

I kind of like the idea of being descended from a smartass.

The point being that names are serious business. Even if you're Dutch.

I don't know if anyone in the community has such an inspired achternaam. I'll have to ask around.

I do know that my last name, while rather common and dull in the US, is considered to be quite posh here. In Dutch the name is rendered as Brujin and indeed that is the name of one of the families here. Indeed, they seem to have taken me to heart as a long lost cousin.