(With apologies to Interconnected for the title format.)
I found out from a chain of comments on the venerable Language Hat that the Jewish surnames Katz, Matz, and Schatz were all originally acronyms.
Katz comes from כוהן צדק kohen tsedek “righteous priest” — you’ll of course recognise kohen as the origin of the surname Cohen, denoting Judaism’s paternal priestly lineage.1
Matz is similarly derived from מורה צדק more tsedek, meaning “teacher of righteousness”, and Schatz, the odd one out, comes from שליח ציבור shaliaẖ tsibur, referring to a cantor, though more literally translated as “emissary of the congregation”.
Meanwhile, in the Russian Empire, bastard children would often have their surnames symbolically clipped just so noöne went around thinking they had anything to do with their aristocratic fathers. Thus Ivan Pnin was the son of Nikolaj Repnin, and Elizabeta Tëmkina was the daughter of Grigorij Potëmkin.
This isn’t a surname, but by all accounts it isn’t a given name either, and once you’ve noticed it, you’ll never be able to unsee it. The name Jebediah does not exist. Jedediah was a very real Biblical figure after whom many a son has been named, but there’s no variant of any real-life person being named Jebediah with a B. (I know what you’re thinking — but, nope, Jeb Bush’s name is… an acronym, again, for John Ellis Bush.)
There’s this weird inconsistency in English in how we treat the names of people from cultures where the surname comes first. Chinese and Korean people usually keep the original order: Qian Xuesen and Bong Joon-ho are indeed from the families Qian and Bong, and it would be quite the faux pas to refer to “Mr Joon-ho”.
Japanese names are less consistent — traditionally they’ve been flipped to conform to the English order, so Hayao Miyazaki was born to a Mr and Mrs Miyazaki, but the trend in recent times has been to restore them to the original order, such that the former foreign secretary officially styles himself as Kōno Tarō, born to Kōno Yōhei.
Then, at the bottom of the ladder, there sits Hungary, whose names are so European-sounding and so universally reordered that most people don’t even realise that, in his home country, the prime minister is called Orbán Viktor. (This gets even more confusing with middle names — the mayor of Budapest, known elsewhere as Gergely Szilveszter Karácsony, is natively Karácsony Gergely Szilveszter, his given name nestled squarely in the middle!)
One last onomastic oddity. In olden days, the capital letter F was written as if double struck, looking like two lowercase f’s put side-by-side. This was copied and copied and misread over and over again until it became the case that some particularly snooty English surnames were properly spelt to begin in lowercase — such as in the cases of Gonville ffrench-Beytagh and Charles ffoulkes. Truly, the irregularities of our language’s orthography know no bounds.
First and foremost: one of the Congos is gonna have
to take one for the team. There’s no way about it. I get that “Zaïre” is kind of skunked, but at the
very least, one of them should consider making “Congo-Kinshasa” or “Congo-Brazzaville” official, to
spare us all the tyranny of having to repeat “Democratic Republic of the Congo” a thousand times
until we die.
The other main snafu of nomenclature is Dominica and
the Dominican Republic: two countries, both of which are in the Caribbean, and both of which have
the demonym “Dominican”, except stressed on different syllables. (Dominica on the -ni-, the
republic on the -mi-.) This is not tenable.
The Central African Republic might be better off
going by the Sango “Bêafrika”, too. The name worked when it was the Central African Empire, high on
Bokassa the butcher’s tinpot monarch dreams, but in a world of sixty-second attention spans, most of
the time, it’ll end up shortened to 
We’re getting into pettier territory now with New
Zealand, Britain’s antipodean twin
Equatorial Guinea is neither
crossed by the equator
South Africa means the opposite of “North Africa” is
“Southern Africa“ and is overall terribly generic. “Azania”’s the obvious pick, but historically
inaccurate at best, being the Greeks’ name for what is now the Tanzanian and Kenyan coast. Might i
suggest “Macrobia”, the opposite of Hyperborea, the semi-mythic land of the long-lived and happy at
the very tip of Africa, beyond where the Romans ever ventured?
And “United Arab Emirates” is trivially true, but
boring as sin. The worst part is there’s no compelling alternative, with the area being an
artificial conglomerate of princedoms once called the “Trucial States” because… er, they’d all
signed truces with the British Empire. 10/10 naming, bang up job, good enough, let’s all go home.
Last, the bald eagle in the room: the United States
of America, hogging the name of two entire continents all for itself in typical Yankee fashion. For
all i care, they can keep it: the alternatives are straight trash. “Usona”? “Fredonia”?
“United Statesians”?? Gods know nobody’s saying that with a straight face. Plus, it’s
really funny when people from the rest of the Americas get riled up online about people using the
word “American” for the U.S.
