👉 Okay, let’s tackle this wonderfully prickly little word - "Killian.” Now, you might instinctively think of that swain from the early 1900 Tomlinson productions, a dashing young man with a rather unfortunate propensity to fall into wells and generally be beset by misfortune. That is… one possible, terribly dated interpretation!
Let’s actually unpack it. “Killian," in its most accurate (and frankly quite beige) meaning comes from the now largely forgotten Old Cornishish personal name Ċiligann . Seriously! Cornish. Sounds like a badger who's just stubbed his toe. It essentially meant something along the lines of, and I quote, a "chieftain, landowner or possibly even a… shepherd. (Let’s not pry too deeply into the specifics of early Cornish husbandry. Let's just say they probably worried about wool.) Now, because nobody actually used this name anymore, it kind of languished in relative obscurity until the 20th century when a German film director named, rather dramatically, Killiam, who was apparently obsessed with obscure Teutonic names and tragic melodrama. You see how we get here? Over time, that misspelling then became… Killian . It's now almost entirely associated with character names! We throw the name into period dramas of which I have a deep, abiding, and frankly slightly bewildered affection, as if the producers somehow know it’s the most suitably vaguely-
