Frankly Franking the Franks

A couple Sundays ago I walked over to listen to the Adult Sunday School class when the teacher asked, “Can I be frank with you?”

At that moment it occurred to me that as a person whose name is Frank, I can’t use the word “frank” without people thinking I’m trying to be funny. I’d have to say, “Can I be honest with you?”

Frank’s an interesting name. You can’t shorten it for a nickname. You can only lengthen it. As in Frankie. The only two people who called me that were my mother, now deceased, and my youngest sister, who gets a pass because I like her.

There was this one jerk in high school who would often sing the first couple lines of “Frankie and Johnny” without actually hitting one of the notes, and then say, “Frankie was the girl. Did you hear that? Frankie was the girl.” I think I was supposed to feel insulted, but the only thing I felt was contempt. I imagine he became one of those dads who tell the same joke a thousand times.

To be frank, I like the name Frank. And it has a history. When that teacher used it he meant something like “honest, forthright, blunt.” But my name has a lot of other meanings, and to catalog those I turned to the twenty-volume Oxford English Dictionary.

There are four long columns of tiny type with definitions for Frank. The first notes “”A person belonging to the Germanic nation, or coalition of nations, that conquered Gaul in the 6th century” The Franks “were named from their national weapon, the franca,” or javelin.

A Frank is also “an enclosure, especially a place to feed hogs in. A sty.” Hogs? Is that why they call hot dogs “franks”? Either way, I did not know that. Or the javelin thing either..

Frank is also short for Frankincense, and it’s a name given to the plant spurry, so called for its “fattening properties”. A Frank can be “apparently a rendering of the sound made by the bird” known as the heron. Did you know that a horse can be “frank to the road?”

One definition I’d heard of was “The superscribed signature of a person…entitled to send letters post free.” And according to the OED anything “that may be franked” is Frankable.

Similarly, you get franked