What’s in a name?

If you read Nate’s recent post on strong-arming the box by getting inside a girl’s head you may have noticed the aside at the bottom in which he asks me to “just go with” his claim that parents replace “c” with “k” in names to create phony imitations of the original (and they’re kids are morons by association).  Now don’t get me wrong, I think that the desire to promote name individuality is overrated and produces ridiculous spellings of my name (such as Eriq, Erick etc.) but I must take offense at the notion that my spelling, E-r-i-k, is not, in fact, the original.  My name, Erik, is the modern Scandinavian pronunciation of the original “Eirik,” meaning “always the ruler” or “one king.”  Although a cognate of the name “Eric,” the spelling with the “K” has the longest historical roots and is most commonly used for Scandinavian royalty.  When the name was introduced to England it took on the more generally recognized spelling “Eric”  as part of a common practice among  British, and later American, officials to accommodate words of other origins to the English alphabet (similarly, my last name, Holland, is simply the phonetic spelling of the Norwegian original, which I can spell by hand, but am unsure how to create using this keyboard).  Leave it to those damn English-speaking elitists (Nathan included) to insist that their bastardization of a prior creation is actually the original.  So for all of you Starbuck’s  employees out there, the next time  somebody orders a cup of Joe and tells you their name, don’t be afraid to spell it the proper way, with a “k.”  And Nate, a word to the wise from this One King by way of my man Jay-Z: don’t throw rocks at the thrown.