I promised yesterday that we'd have a little fun, appropriate for a weekend, about names like Barack and Rahm.  Some Obama Administration enthusiasts, who think they know Semitic languages, have put up on the Internet the idea that Obama and his White House Chief-of Staff Rahm Emanuel, are a team of thunder and lightning, or rather, lightning and thunder. The claim is that Rahm means thunder and Barack means lightning. This is wrong, except in the slightly far-fetched sense that half of it is right. 

Huh?  Bear with, please. 

Barack is derived from the Arabic for blessed. The Hebrew equivalent is Baruch. Some people think Barack means lightning because they apparently know that former Israeli Prime Minister and current Defense Minister Ehud Barak's last name means lightning. No, the difference has nothing to do with the letter "c" being present or absent. In Arabic and Hebrew, the names Barack and Baruch are spelled with three key consonants, as nearly all Semitic roots have three consonants, and none of the letters in these alphabets are vowels. These are "b", "r" and a letter that, in one of its two forms, has no equivalent in English, a gutteral "k". (If you put an "m" sound in front of these three letters, which Semitic languages like to do for various purposes, you can get Mubarak, as in Hosni Mubarak, which comes from the same root.) 

Now, Barak meaning lightning in both Hebrew and Arabic is spelled differently: "b", "r" and another sound that English does not have, a glottal-k that is technically transliterated as a "q". This is the same letter that starts the word for "holy" in both Arabic and Hebrew, which is why Arabs refer to Jerusalem as "al-Qods", and the Hebrew word for holy is "qadosh."

So Barack does not mean lightning, except that it does in the innocent ear of native Arabic and Hebrew speakers, because Americans, and the President himself, say the word in a way closer to its being "lightning" than "blessed" in those languages. A lot of Arabic and especially Hebrew speakers get lazy and don't always fully glottalize their "qofs" these days.

As for Rahm, it does not mean thunder. It means something closer to mercy or grace, and is the Hebrew equivalent of the Arabic word "rahman", which is important in Muslim liturgy as "rahaman" and "rahamim" are in Jewish liturgy. It's Hebrew spelling is "r", 'khet" (another, third different lighter gutteral sound that Arabic and Hebrew have but that English does not) and "m". (I wish I could import Arabic and Hebrew letters here to show you exactly what the differences look like, but I don't know how.) The word for thunder is ra-am, spelled "r", "ayin" (a fourth letter not existing in English), "m". More or less the same sound, spelled just "r", "m", means high or lofty. But Rahm Emanuel is neither thunder nor high and lofty.

There, got that? Don't worry, by the way; English has some sounds that Arabic and Hebrew lack.  Like "ch", for example. 

Hussein, by the way, means "handsome", more or less. Emanuel means "God is with us."  I don't know what Biden means.....hardly ever.