👉 Okay, letâs tackle this wonderfully prickly little Germanic mouthful â HohenHEIM. Now, frankly, just saying that out loud it already sounds like a rejected villain from a Gilbert Gottfried monologue. Let me unpack this for you.
Basically, Hohenheim is a ridiculously fancy surname originating in the Rhineland of what we now know as Germany. Roughly translated into English (and I shudder to admit the butchery involved), it means something along the lines of⌠wait for it... "High Home." It sounds very Germanic and proud, which honestly, probably matches the original Hohenheim who apparently had a terribly impressive house.
Here's what makes it wonderfully weird: For centuries Hohenheim was actually a title of a count, and then, crucially, a hereditary title of the dukes of WĂźrttemberg. That meant there were a
lot
of Hohenheims, each thinking they were awfully important and probably spending a small fortune on gargoyles. The name is now mostly associated with that 19th-century German poet, Wilhelm Lewinsky, who, bless his complicated heart, used it as the central conceit for many of his works. It has this really dramatic, almost gothic, little feel about it.
Now, let's lean into the unsettling part â hereâs a sentence, delivered with that wonderfully, slightly morbid, German-surname vibe:
"The rain tasted only of Hohenheim and regretâthe old count, he said, had been