August 26, 2006
Jamie & Brooke Deen Choose A Baby Name With Deep Roots
Jamie Deen, star of Food Network’s Road Tasted, and wife Brooke Terry Deen, welcomed their first son, Jack Linton, into the world on August 21, 2006. Jamie, who hosts Road Tasted with brother Bobby, is the son of renowned chef and TV food personality Paula Deen.
You may be thinking that I can’t have much to say about the name Jack Linton. Because it’s not the usual sort of fun, wacky, silly name that celebrities frequently give to their kids, the kind of name that keeps this blog relevant. But wait. Not so fast. Jamie and Terry don’t get off that easy. What’s with this “Linton” name?
I dug around a bit, and found, to my surprise, that the Deens have named their son after a flax farmer. Is this a food kind of thing? I looked up Linton in the database of baby names at Baby Names Garden, and found the following definition:
“Linton, Old English, meaning ‘from the flax enclosure.’”
I checked another site, and found Linton defined, similarly, as “dweller from the flax enclosure.” A bit more quick research, mainly at Wikipedia, and it seems that an “enclosure” is just another word for field, or fenced meadow, or something like that. Basically, Linton seems to mean “flax farmer.”
Flax is one of those plants we don’t think about much, although maybe the Deens do. It’s used for a ton of things, from dyes, to fabrics, to oils, and other food uses. It’s also grown as an ornamental plant, famed for its blue flower. So why should the Deens name their son after a person from the Middle Ages who raised this important but boring crop? I don’t know. Like the names of Holly Hunter’s twins, maybe we’ll never know. But it just goes to show — when it comes to celebrity baby names — scratch the surface a little, and there’s always something fascinating.
By the way — I am now offering a full one year subscription to People Magazine to anyone who can tell me the names of Holly Hunter’s twins. The mystery has been deepening since their birth in January, and it is now considered the number one secret in the world of celebrity baby names.
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