Recent Meeting Minutes---Just Resting Peaceably

Friday, Suzanne joined us for the weekly meeting of the Mikes. She shared her perspective on wayward students, in particular one using the F-word to describe her college course. Mike added his insights on students with recent "family funeral" excuses. He was on his way to meet with students that day. He had a fair amount of scepticism about the funeral excuses and noted that he wondered if students ever felt a backlash of guilt when a genuine passing occured. I find that if you "accept" an excuse from one student, invariably there is a rash of similar tragedies with the remainder of students. Human nature, or just the games students play?

Curious phenomenon to note: For the tech writing class assignment about writing sentence definitions, I found students logging in to Wikipedia to find definitions. Is it that hard to think up a sentence definition on your own?

The El in the Mike

While thinking about the "el" at the end of Michael, which I am sure you know stands for "God" in the ancient Hebrew, I started to compile a list of other el derived names:

Ishmael
Raphael
Gabriel
Daniel
Samuel
Lemuel
Ezekiel

[or Elijah, with the el up front]


But this led me to think about other sets of names with identical endings--for instance the "ards":

Richard
Bernard
Leonard
Howard

and the "alds":

Donald
Ronald
Reginald

The Ards and the Alds seem to be British or maybe Anglo-Saxon--like the "berts"

Robert
Hubert
Egbert

But I can't really say what those other endings signify.

I just know that the el in Mike means "God." In the Arabic languages, "el" turns to "al" as in Allah. So that we can cite a lot of el or al followed-by-a-hyphen names.

What about the "elle" in Michelle, (and Estelle and Rochelle) which seems to be a feminine diminutive. Does it perhaps mean "goddess"?