Jan Kanty

The name begins in Hebrew. Jan descends from Yohanan, which means "god is gracious," and it reached Polish through the Latin Ioannes and Greek Ioannes. The second word is younger. Kanty marks a place, the small town of Kęty in southern Poland.

That town gave Poland Jan z Kęt, the fifteenth-century scholar known in Latin as Joannes Cantius. He taught at the Kraków academy and copied manuscripts by hand. The Church canonized him in 1767, and in the Polish calendar his imieniny falls on 20 October.

So Jan Kanty holds two things together. There is the Hebrew sense that god is gracious, and there is the memory of a professor from Kęty. A boy who carries it inherits both a meaning and a man. On a class register the two words sit side by side, the biblical first name and the toponym behind the saint. What the name says, still, is that god is gracious.