Cornelia

Cornelia comes from the Roman family name Cornelius, and behind that name sits the Latin cornu, meaning horn. Polish renders it simply: róg. The horn belonged to Rome long before it belonged to any single girl, a badge of one of the Republic's old patrician houses.

One woman fixed the name in memory. Cornelia, mother of the Gracchi, lived in the second century BC and won praise from Roman writers for her learning and for raising two sons who shook the Republic. Asked once to show her jewels, she pointed instead to her children. The name kept that dignity.

In Poland it settled into a small family of its own. The variant Kornelia is the form most girls carry on a birth certificate, while Nela does the daily work, short and quick. There is a masculine cousin too, Kornel, so the horn crosses between a brother and a sister.

Read out from a school register, Kornelia and Nela can name the same child. The root holds either way: cornu, a horn.