897: frank and the franks May 23, 2017

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People should endeavor to be frank with each other, even if they aren't named Franklin. Interestingly, the name and the adjective share the same root, though this is not to say that people named Franklin have been associated with honesty, in the same way that 'dick' denoting a penis derived from the frequency of people named Dick. While today Franklin might not mean anything more than the name, in the days of Feudal societies the term referred to a landowner who was free but wasn't noble, ultimately coming from 'francus' meaning ‘free’. This is the same origin as 'frank', but it is was used far before these land-owners; the Germanic tribe, the Franks were the only group to have full freedom in Frankish Gaul. The name for this tribe is from the Old English 'franca' meaning ‘javelin’, similar to the root for 'Saxon' but was also reinforced by the Latin 'francus'. As mentioned in the post yesterday, modern day France composed the majority of the Frankish empire, and indeed 'France' comes from the has the same derivation.

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