"But you definitely get a different sense of the Iliad (and one that's not really wrong) if you think of it as Chief Might of the People and Chief Great Leader drawing on their alliances with other chiefs to reclaim Chief Might of the People's wife, who had been abducted by Strong Defender, the son of Chief Courageous."
So when Neal Stephenson named Hiro Protagonist he was being retro.
The anglo-saxon name meanings are often plain, or at least so foreign sounding to our ears now that it’s easier to hear them as meaningful: Beowulf is “bee-hunter”, probably; etc.
Hebrew names are the interesting case where they’re so normal in western culture as “oh, a given name” that we often seem completely blind to their meanings. Adam, for example, probably means something like “humanity”, the collective noun. Israel is roughly “wrestles with god”. And Jesus Christ, as famously memed on tumblr, is modernizable as “oily josh”. (and in that form of his name, has already been translated through the greek first anyway!)
That's interesting about Xanthippe and the fancy-fancy horse names. I had recently learned about the etymology of Hippopotamus (water horse) so I was excited to see another use.
As a plug, I'm really into etymologies as well and made EtymologyExplorer for visually navigating roots and descendants https://www.etymologyexplorer.com/
“ Aristotle means Best End or Best Purpose, as his name includes the telos that plays such an important role in his philosophy.”
That’s almost too good to be true! Never has a name been more apt. It’s sort of recursive - like the telos of his name was to give rise to the guy who came up with “Telos.”
Along similar lines, in English writings on WWII, I wish we would see "Fuhrer" translated into English, rather than left as-is; it gives a significantly different sense of how the Nazis presented Hitler and how the German people perceived him - not someone with some sort of weird opaque title, but quite literally The Leader.
So when Neal Stephenson named Hiro Protagonist he was being retro.