… and is Julia Louis Dreyfus related to Richard Dreyfus?

And the answer might be self evident, if I actually had known how to spell both names correctly:

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Richard Dreyfuss, and “No, they are not related.”

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So I’m puttering around this morning, fixing another breakfast of Fried Apples and Bacon, with some Hazelnut Coffee. I think I saw the name “Baton Rouge” on something, either on the TV or on a web page, and I said the name out loud, emphasizing the first part as “Bey Taun” and then “Rugge,” as in Luge. And that led me to recalling that Moulin Rouge meant “Red Windmill,” to which my processing went, then Baton Rouge must mean “red stick.”

I’m not sure if I’ve ever thought this through before, but laughing slightly to my first thought, that “Baton” sounds like “baton” which is a form of stick… or something that a cheerleader once twirled, throwing it up into the air and then catching it before it hit the ground. I then said to myself, “well stranger things have happened,” and “Baton Rouge” might just mean “red stick.” So, I googled for the answer and sure enough, “Baton Rouge” means “red stick” which according to the Web, a red pole (marker) delineated the border between two Indian hunting grounds (I may have remembered that correctly.), and a French explorer seeing this came up with the name “Baton Rouge.”

Sometimes things like this remind me of other like occurrences. Once, I was taking a “Biblical Hebrew” language course and the whole class was translating a long Bible passage. The woman instructor was walking around “looking over our shoulders” to see how we were doing. I had translated a good portion of the text but then had come to a problem. A certain word seemed to mean, “one who travels about the hills & valleys tending sheep,” but this didn’t seem to fit with the meaning of the rest of the passage. The teacher stopped me and then suggested I say the word audibly. “D-V-D”. It was then that she pointed out, this wasn’t a word, but actually the name for “David,” who by the way was a tender of his father’s sheep.