I've said it before, Israel Epstein is like the other Semen Hitler, when it comes to very respectable people who happen to have somewhat unfortunate names.
Semen Hitler was kinda screwed over by people's choice of romanization, though, he could just as easily have been called Semyon Gitler.And Israel Epstein is also kinda like, yeah there's a strong connotation of "apartheid regime and rich nonce", but ultimately there are a lot of people with the forename Israel and the surname Epstein — such as the famous Hawaiian musician, and the fellow who co-discovered the first known oncogenic virus in humans alongside Yvonne Barr and Bert Achong.
I know another great one. There was once a dentist in the 20s-40s in the US midwest, a man named George Washington Hitler. He didn’t change his name bc he said to paraphrase “I never disrespected my name, Adolf did” which is pretty funny bc George Washington is already a pretty tarnished name. It gets better. His son or grandson or something was named Gaylord and went by Gay Hitler.
minor correction; apparently Gay Hitler was the one from 20s to 40s in Ohio, not his dad (can't make this shit up)
Lol yeah you’re right, his grandpa (I believe) was George Washington Hitler, he thought he only had one historical reference in his name for a good couple decades. Poor guy, same with семён гитлер, they don’t deserve to be attached to probably the most despicable person on Earth if you’d ask most people
You and CommieWolf are both wrong about the name lol.
Семён (pronounced syeh-MYON) is the Russian version of this name, see Semyon Budyonny for instance.
This guy however was Ukrainian so his name was Семен (pronounced seh-MEN), and it's correctly romanised to Semen.
Also his surname Гитлер would be romanised to Gitler had he been Russian, but as a Ukrainian it's romanised to Hitler due to how Г is pronounced in Ukrainian language.
RESULTS FOR TODAY'S BATTLE...
BOTH SIDES LOSE DUE TO A REALLY, REALLY OBVIOUS OVERSIGHT
Eptein-Barr Virus is now itself a portmanteau of unfortunate names
Slight correction, his name technically is Semyon or Semion, "Semen" is just how anglos would pronounce it because they don't know how to make the Slavic equivalent sound.
Its not actually caused by Romanization though, because if it were, it would have been spelt with an I or a Y, as is usually done when translating the Cyrillic ё, this is almost certainly due to later humorous interpretations, which, to be fair, Semen is a lot funnier of a name.
No, it is a result of romanization: the dots over the ё are often dropped, and so it was historically considerably more common to romanize ё identically to е, this is also why it's "Gorbachev" and generally not "Gorbachov" or "Gorbachyov".
Always bugged the shit out of me that ё is romanized to e in a lot of cases.
Thing is though that in (at least Russian) people also often drop the dots and write a normal e instead of ë
Unfortunate name nowadays, but other than that, what a chad.
Is and was he the only good Israel of two and the only good Epstein of one?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel_Kamakawiwo%CA%BBole
No for Israel.
Israel Epstein is pretty awesome, he was a journalist too.
