Behold the mayfly
Beating wings in ecstasy
Oh, hang on! It’s dead
A number of political commentators picked up this week on the extraordinary coincidence that Liz Truss’ tenure as Prime Minister lasted exactly the same number of days as Brian Clough’s time as manager of Leeds United. And that was about the extent of the story.
A more telling coincidence might be that our current ‘dead duck walking’ shares 60 per cent of her surname with a former US President. Could they be in any way related? Well, let’s have a look.
I once worked on a book about the origin of surnames, which taught me all sorts of interesting things. For example, someone with the surname Hill is probably descended from someone who lived on a hill.
It’s not always that straightforward. Some surnames have multiple possible origins. Take the common surname Green, for example. Someone with the surname Green could be descended from someone who lived on a green or someone who had green eyes, or someone who was actually green.
The point is that surnames were assigned in a very simplistic way to distinguish one person from another, much as we stick nicknames on one another today: Curly, Red, Bignose. It’s a custom that was brought over by the Anglo Saxons and Vikings, as evidenced in their naming culture. The Scandinavian surname Magnusson, for example, means Son of Bignose.
So what can we deduce from the surname Truss? The word ‘truss’ came into English from the French ‘trousse’, which meant to bundle things up and bind together, as you would a sheaf of corn or the metaphorical limbs of a theoretical Prime Minister. It’s where ‘trousseau’ comes from but not, surprisingly, ‘trousers’. Nor is there any relationship between ‘truss’ and ‘trust’. None at all.
There is a theory that the French word ‘trousse’ is one of various descendants of a proto-Indo-European word, which meant to twist, contort or distort. It gave rise to ‘torture’, ‘thwart’ and ‘torque’, the force that makes things rotate, like the new front door of No10.
From the ‘bundling up’ sense came the surgical truss – a 16th century invention of leather and steel springs, worn to contain hernias – and the structural assembly of pieces of metal or wood used as a support in construction.
Someone with the surname Truss, therefore, could be a torturer, a contortionist, a twister, a thwarter, a reaper, a temporary suppressor of internal ruptures, someone who tried to shore up a precariously unstable edifice, or all of the above. Or they might just be descended from someone who wore a truss.
You decide.
