Wednesday, October 04, 2006

What's in a name?

Back when I had to choose a name, I looked over the list of surnames and was immediately struck by "Yeuxdoux." (Someone at LL is a philosopher; I've seen a "Quine" in SL.) It seemed so cute I had to choose it.

I know very little French; most of it's picked up by singing Machaut virelais and rondeaux and a few other French Renaissance-era songs (e.g. "Belle qui tiens ma vie"), along with the very dangerous game (as any Spanish speaker faced with the Portuguese janela can tell you)
of guessing based on what I know of other Romance languages...so I parsed it as "sweet eyes" (isn't "doux" the plural of "douce" as in Machaut's "Douce dame jolie", vide billets-doux? Hmmm. Maybe it's the masculine). Others on SL have said "soft eyes," and indeed Google's translation seems to render it thus.

Googling "yeux doux" turns up "faire les yeux doux," variously rendered "to look amourously [at someone]" or "make {goo-goo, sheep (?!?)} eyes [at someone]".

Perhaps I should have done all that Googling before choosing the name, but I still like it.

No comments: