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‘She isn’t named after the big mountain,’ explained Rick Fulton in the Scottish Daily Record, ‘but from the Latin word nevi, meaning a mole.’ The Latin word in question, naevus (rendered nevus in American English), forms a plural of naevi. So little Nevis probably has moles a-plenty, what with the extra ‘s’ on the end.
Still, there is that tiny island state, St Kitts and Nevis, to be borne in mind. The latter was formerly called Nuestra Señora de las Nieves, ‘Our Lady of the Snows’. This avocation of the Blessed Virgin Mary comes from the Roman basilica of St Mary Major (Sancta Maria ad Nives in Latin), the building of which, pious legend tells, was prompted by a fall of snow in August on the Esquiline hill. Nieves, in consequence, is a girls’ name in Spanish and, in Portuguese, Neves.
Nelly Furtado used to sing folky songs about dicky-birds. Now it’s R&B, hip-hop and dance numbers. Orthography doesn’t get much of a look-in. Nevis’s father, who has now split from Nelly, is called Lil’ Jaz. The apostrophe indicates, effectively if illogically, an apocopation of Little, rather than of Lily. Nelly’s influential producer is called Timbaland, just that — not to be confused with Timberland clothing, or the singer Justin Timberlake.
‘Timbaland made me learn how to shake my booty,’ Nelly explains. Booty, meaning ‘bottom’, is, I think a variant of batty, as in batty man, the pejorative Jamaican term for a male homosexual. As for the title of her new single, ‘Promiscuous’, out now, Nelly says, ‘I love to have sex. I am definitely not encouraging promiscuity but safe, happy and responsible lifestyles for all, hopefully.’ I know that some of you will disapprove of her use of the word hopefully.
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