Friday, November 7, 2008

Rahm & Barack: Thunder & Lightning

My mom's been following Barack Obama's career enthusiastically ever since his 2004 speech. (She's been following my progress with some interest for a while longer.) Loyal readers of BarakorBarack may recall her little joke about my name (see earlier post).

Today, via the magic of email, she pointed out the trans-linguistic significance of Rahm Emanuel's name. As you may recall, my name means lightning in Hebrew, and Barack means blessed in Swahili. But Rahm -- and here's the weird part -- means thunder in Hebrew. So you could say that we'll soon have thunder and lightning in the White House. (Better than crooks and morons, he typed inflammatorily.)

The final wrinkle on the Rahm coincidence is that the newly appointed Chief of Staff's equally famous brother is named Ari ... which is my dad's name. It means lion in Hebrew. And of course, my dad also spells his name differently.

Oh, the endless fun. It's like I was born for this. In fact, when considering adding another entity to the family (way back when), my parents thought they'd name a boy Rahm. So, yes, we'd have grown up as Thunder and Lightning, and yes, we'd be in quite the conversational pickle now. Conveniently enough, none of that happened.

P.S.: As I was typing the last sentence, I got a Facebook message from a friend in Israel: "Your popularity must be skyrocketing now with such a name." Well, that's not exactly how I'd put it. But I'm open to skyrocketing popularity. My friend is a defense correspondent for a news channel; funny that he'd inadvertently include a munitions reference in a simple message.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

As a friend of mine pointed out on facebook, "Thunder and Lightning" is a better image for the White House than "Bush and Dick".