paperandglue.net

So, Stacey was over last night and we were working on stuff, stuff which diverted into an impromptu creative writing exercise that created an imagined controversial and religious-themed southern Manitoba art installation, and thus, an imagined Mennonite name. Stacey told me about how her mom went to high school in Winkler and was the only non-Mennonite in her class. This personal history blossomed into a present-day game where our friend Cam would play a game with her called Shout Mennonite Names!, getting her to announce random Mennonite-sounding names (first and last) on request.

Naturally, this game took on a life of its own. That life included Cam’s boyfriend, Steven Cochrane, making a generator website of the same name.

The site came about in February of 2009 when my boyfriend (who lives in Winnipeg), told me about a game that some of his friends had devised, in which players take turns shouting plausible-sounding Mennonite names at one another. I can only assume that they came up with this in February of another year, when the Winter Crazies were at their peak.

Not being from Manitoba (or, indeed, any other place with an unusually high concentration of Mennonites), my own knowledge of Mennonite nomenclature was far less intimate and far less ingrained than that of the company I keep. I could muster a “Menno Wiebe!” or a “Harry Dyck!” but after that I was more or less tapped out. Still, I wanted to play along, so I wrote a simple PHP script that would randomly combine entries from two lists of common Mennonite given and family names.

The above is from the “What?” section of the site — be sure to read it, because Steven’s work is done with due dillegence and references. He’s got sources.

I myself am not Mennonite, though my ancestors literally lived in villages neighbouring Mennonite ones in Russia. Close, but no cigar. In modern-day Manitoba, being Mennonite is no longer necessarily a religious affiliation — it’s an ethnic one, though of course the Mennonite religion is still alive and well, with several denominations and hundreds of churches in our province alone. I’m trying to quantify why a site like this is so fundamentally entertaining, but I can’t. Maybe it’s just that I’ve grown up in a place where the name “Dyck” (pronounced “dick”) is so commonplace as to not be worth a snicker, where two people named “Friesen” can get married and no one assumes they’re anything but very distantly related. It’s a peculiarity of Manitoba, and I enjoy it.