May 02, 2008

Surname

In the news today, there was a report about a teacher with the surname Ding. It reminded me of a teacher with quite a rare surname, Dieu (pronounced dew). I don't know what it is in Chinese or what his native dialect is.

One day Mr Dieu was walking along the corridor beside some classrooms where lessons were going on. Those were the old type of classrooms with open doors and windows. Suddenly the senior assistant came out of his office and shouted after him, "Dieu! Mr Dieu!" I think the SA wanted to talk to him.

It was quite funny. Dieu is an offensive word in cantonese.

4 comments:

Kongming said...

ding chun qiu's ding & three kingdom's Ding Yuan?

Victor said...

I thought my surname 古 is rare enough. Mr Dieu's surname is even more rare... and luckily so.

Kongming said...

gu tian le and gu ju ji got same surname as u mah.
maybe its not common in sg but so long as its in 100 family surname, its not rare

Anonymous said...

I've always been fascinated by surnames.

Why did this Mr. 丁 make it to the news? Is it because "Mr. D" managed to educate his class effectively without ever failing anyone?

According to WP < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ding_(surname) >, it isn't really that a rare a surname ("the 46th")...