by Kyle S. Plotkin
Investment Advisor Representative
[email protected]
The calendar year of 2024 was an expensive one in the Plotkin household. It all started back in 2013, when I purchased a roughly 35-year-old townhouse in North Wales as a starter home. The plan was to build some equity, stay there for maybe five years, and trade up into something bigger and better. Well, life happens, housing prices go crazy, and… twelve years later… I’m still in the same home, now with my lovely wife and my 12-year-old stepson.
As you probably know, every house reaches a point in its lifespan where it needs some serious maintenance. Mine started with a small leak in the roof that had gotten progressively more serious. I had the roof replaced this past spring before needing to replace much of the drywall in our ceiling to remedy the water damage from said roof leak. We even had to spend a week living in a hotel while all this work was taking place. Add in some deck repairs, a new front door, and some siding maintenance and the costs added up pretty quickly.
One consequence of all this construction was a need to re-paint much of the house. Seeing that I lack both the skills and the time to take on such a project, I decided to hire a friend of a friend to do the work. We’ll call him “Tony.” The money really helped Tony out and it was cheaper for me than hiring another pricy contractor. Win-win.
Anyway, I had to add Tony into my cell phone contacts without knowing his last name. Rather than asking for a last name, I just saved him as “Tony Painter”. It got me thinking about the other contacts in my phone. I had made a concerted effort at one point to put actual full names on every contact in my phone. The problem is that now I have all kinds of people saved in there with no idea who they are. Who was that plumber I used once back in 2017 or the guy that sells the club seats for the Phillies? Your guess is as good as mine.
It made me realize that my wanting to be “official” and “proper” with full names was actually foolhardy. But I can easily identify Joseph Karate or Alex Brad’s Dad or Justin Florida or Sarah Old Neighbor.
It reminded me of a viral video I saw a few months ago by a linguistics content creator that goes by @etymologynerd. He went into the history of last names and how they came into being in the current form. He highlighted four specific categories that could traced to similar origins.
- Occupational: names that denote what that person does like Miller or Smith or Cook.
- Toponymic: names linked to a place or geographic feature or animal. You may have some in your own contacts like Eddie Gym or Johnny Mazda Dealer or Justin Colorado. This leads to common last names such as Woods or French or Fox.
- Adjectival: names for a defining characteristic or behavior such as Green or Short or Quick.
- Relationship: names such as John’s Son becoming Johnson.
I looked into the origins of my own last name Plotkin and found a few possibilities. It could refer to Plotki, the names of several villages in Russia and Belarus. It could also refer to Plotke, a Yiddish word meaning “to gossip” or Plotka, a Russian word signifying a dealer of fish. Any of the above seem plausible, given my Ashkenazi heritage and family origins in Eastern Europe.
That brings me back to Tony Painter. I still don’t know his last name, and thanks to Venmo, it doesn’t matter anyway. Here’s hoping that the remaining work on my house is done in short order and we can get back to normal life. With that, I wish you all a prosperous (and less expensive) New Year in 2025.