For someone who grew up with an Oscar Mayer jingle forever lodged his his brain, it took decades before I became curious about the surname. I had always supposed it was a Germanic word for “mayor” but then, if so, mayors had to be very busy in the boudoir to make so many. The reason I grew curious was that there are so many ways to spell it. I’ve had people complain to me about having to spell their name every time, but I’ve run across “Meyer” spelled “Maier,” “Meyers,” “Mayer,” “Myers,” and many more. Yes, I’m afraid you have to spell it. (My wife’s surname is Stephenson and she has to spell it every single time. For that matter, so do I.) Why so many Mayers? A little (very little) research turned up that it comes from old German for “manager”—thus possibly related to “mayor” and maybe even “major”—but that over time it came to mean “tenant,” basically a freeman farmer. That’s why so many.
Growing up in a small town, the very common surnames I encountered were “Smith,” “Jones,” and “Miller.” My mother even married one of the Miller clan eventually. “Smith” and its variants, derive from craftsmen of various sorts, such as “blacksmith.” “Miller” is someone who works a mill. The odd one out here is “Jones,” which derives from a prolific “John” somewhere way back when. I’ve written before about how common (and widely variable) the name John is. All these names share a “non-noble” background, it seems. People of occupations that keep us going. It made sense that “Meyer” was a name for farmers.
I grew up with a different, but not that uncommon (as the internet has taught me), surname. Interestingly, all of my grandparental surnames were unusual, although one is compounded with “Schmidt,” or “Smith.” I find names fascinating. With so many of our species running around, unique forenames weren’t in large enough supply for us to stop there. Which John are you? John Johnson? Okay, now I can place you. I tend to struggle with transposed letters from time to time, making the variants of “Meyer” particularly difficult for me. And that “y” acts like a vowel and sometimes becomes an “i.” Or a “j” in German. Cheeky. We identify closely with our names. They say something about us. Thankfully we have other ways of distinguishing ourselves, otherwise we’d all just be lost in the crowd.