Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise announced the arrival of their daughter Suri on April 18, 2006. “Suri?” Where did Tom and Katie get Suri from? I knew things were going to get messy when I read that Suri means “get the heck out of here” in Hebrew (or words to that effect). A Cruise family spokesperson countered that Suri “has its origins in Hebrew, meaning “princess,” or in Persian, meaning “red rose”.
Well, yes, the Hebrew name Sarah certainly means “princess.” But Suri isn’t Sarah.
Tom and Katie may wish they’d done a bit more research on Suri before they announced it to the world. According to 75,000 + Baby Names for the 21st Century, by Lori Cooper, (Lothian Books, 2001), “Suri” is Todas for “pointy-nosed.” Ouch! Who are these Todas anyway, and what’s their problem with pointy noses? Over to Wikipedia, where we find that the Toda people are a small, pastoral tribe of southern India who reside in the Nilgiri Hills. The Toda number less than 1,000 and are an isolated people who speak Toda, a Dravidian language (Dravidian being a group of languages spoken in southern India, Sri Lanka, and parts adjacent). But no word about why the Todas are so hung up on the pointy nose issue.
I’m not saying that “pointy-nosed” is the only meaning for Suri. Or even the main one. There are many other appearances of the word Suri around the world, inlcuding being the name for a Pashtun tribe; a “rose” in Persian; an ethnic group in southwest Ethiopia; “sun” in Sanskrit; a district in West Bengal; a term for a type of alpaca wool, and even, supposedly, “pickpocket” in Japanese. But I can’t help feeling that the meaning little Suri is really going to be steamed about is “pointy-nosed”.
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