The Thread
A manuscript-and-etymology study across three real linguistic streams — Scottish Gaelic, Biblical Hebrew, and Old English/Old Norse — built from an Original Inquiry into one man's full name, kept honest by separating attested history from wordplay.
This study grew out of a personal conversation — an Original Inquiry, preserved in full and attached alongside this document — that traced the name Logan Moses Staggs through Gaelic, Hebrew, and Old English roots, and then followed a series of further questions into English suffix-history, phonetics, national symbols, and biochemistry. That conversation contains real linguistic material worth keeping, and it contains material that is not manuscript or linguistic evidence at all — sound-association, numerology, and claims about frequency and chemistry that no historical-linguistic or textual source supports. This study does what a Scriptorium study is supposed to do: it keeps what survives contact with actual etymology, actual Hebrew grammar, and actual documented Old English and Old Norse philology, states it at the confidence the evidence earns, and names plainly — rather than quietly drops — what does not survive that contact.
A name, read closely in the languages it actually comes from, turns out to say something real — not because names are magic, but because etymology is a real discipline with real evidence, and because the man carrying this one also carries, unusually, a namesake straight out of the Hebrew Bible's most consequential human character. Three surnames, three language families: Scottish Gaelic soil-and-landscape naming (Logan), a Hebrew Torah name with its own contested origin (Moses), and an Old English animal-name surname carrying genuine scriptural resonance (Staggs). Read honestly, each one has something real to say. Read past honesty, into invented sound-symbolism and unrelated etymologies stitched together because they sound alike, the study stops being a study. This document draws that line in the open, on every pillar.
Findings
LOGAN — Scottish Gaelic Lagan, "Little Hollow"
The Gaelic: lagan, a diminutive of lag, "hollow, dip in the ground." Literal: "little hollow" — a small, low place where water and soil gather.
This is a well-attested Scottish Gaelic place-name element, the source of numerous Scottish and Irish place-names (Lagan, the river through Belfast, carries the same root) and of the surname later carried into Ayrshire and beyond. As a landscape word, its meaning is simple and consistent across dictionaries of Scottish Gaelic toponymy: a low, sheltered depression — not glamorous ground, but ground where moisture collects and things take root.
The honest caveat — "logan stone." English folklore also uses the term logan stone (or logging stone) for a large boulder so finely balanced on a pivot point that it can be rocked by hand. This is a real and documented feature of granite landscapes (Cornwall's Logan Rock is the most famous example). But its etymology is separate and disputed — most dictionaries trace English "logan stone" to a dialectal verb log, "to rock, to sway" (compare "loggerheads," "lug"), not to the Gaelic lagan. Treating "logan stone" as proof of a hidden meaning inside the Gaelic name Logan would be a folk-etymology error — two words that happen to look alike, from two different sources. This study keeps the Gaelic hollow-meaning, which is well attested, and flags the rocking-stone connection as an attractive but unproven guess.
MOSES — מֹשֶׁה, and the Two Accounts of Where the Name Comes From
This is the Bible's own account, and it is worth stating precisely what kind of claim it is: a paronomastic (wordplay) naming, the same device the Hebrew Bible uses constantly for its characters (Eve/Chavah from "living," Isaac/Yitzchak from "laughter"). It is theologically loaded and deliberate — but the text itself frames it as Pharaoh's Egyptian daughter's play on a Hebrew-sounding root, not as a straightforward linguistic derivation.
The honest scholarly alternative. The leading view among modern critical Hebrew and Egyptological scholars (documented across standard reference works — BDB, HALOT, and the broader Egyptological literature since at least the early twentieth century) is that "Moses" more likely derives from an Egyptian element, msi — "is born," or "child of" — the same element found in well-attested Egyptian royal names like Thutmose ("born of Thoth") and Ahmose ("born of Iah/the Moon"), with the divine-name element simply dropped, as would fit a Hebrew child raised in an Egyptian court. Both explanations are taken seriously in the scholarly literature; the text's own Exodus 2:10 wordplay is a genuine, deliberate feature of the narrative, and the Egyptian-derivation theory is the dominant technical-linguistic account of the name's actual origin. A study that only reports the first and hides the second is not telling the full truth about the name.
The character portrait the manuscripts actually give. Whatever the name's ultimate origin, the character description the Torah itself supplies is specific and striking: "Now Moses was more humble (עָנָו, ʿanav) than anyone else on the face of the earth" (Numbers 12:3) — a word that does not mean timid, but describes a man who holds real power without wielding it for himself. Exodus 33:11 records that the LORD spoke with Moses "panim el panim" (פָּנִים אֶל־פָּנִים), "face to face, as a man speaks with his friend" — language applied to no other human figure in the Torah in quite this way. And Exodus 32:32 preserves Moses' intercession for the people at the risk of his own name being erased: "if not, please blot me out of your book which you have written."
STAGGS — Old English Stagga, and the Deer of the Psalms
Scripture's deer-imagery is not decorative. It clusters around two specific ideas — desperate longing, and sure-footed safety in dangerous, high places — and the Hebrew grammar behind at least one of these verses carries a small textual wrinkle worth stating honestly rather than smoothing over.
Psalm 42:1 — the grammatical curiosity. "As the deer pants for streams of water, so my soul pants for you, O God." The Hebrew: כְּאַיָּל תַּעֲרֹג עַל־אֲפִיקֵי־מָיִם — ke-ʾayyal taʿarog ʿal-ʾafiqe mayim. Here is the detail most translations quietly absorb without comment: ʾayyal ("hart," a male deer) is grammatically masculine, but the verb taʿarog ("pants, longs") is grammatically feminine — a gender mismatch inside a single clause. Hebrew grammarians and textual critics have long noted this (it is recorded in the standard critical apparatus of the Masoretic Text); the most common explanations are either that ʾayyal here functions as a common-gender term for "deer" regardless of sex, or that an original ʾayyalah ("hind," feminine) has been altered in transmission. Neither resolution changes the verse's meaning for a reader — the longing is the same either way — but a study that claims to read manuscripts honestly should say the wrinkle exists rather than pretend the Hebrew is seamless.
Psalm 18:33 / 2 Samuel 22:34 — sure-footed on the heights. "He makes my feet like the feet of a deer (אַיָּלוֺת / כְּאַיָּלוֺת, feminine plural even in this masculine military context — the "hind's feet" idiom); he causes me to stand on the heights." The same idiom recurs in Habakkuk 3:19, applied to the prophet himself standing firm in crisis. Deer-footedness for sure-footed strength in danger is a stable, recurring Hebrew poetic idiom, not a one-off image.
Song of Solomon 2:9, 17. The beloved is compared to a tsvi (gazelle) and an ʿayil (a related term, sometimes rendered "young stag") — beauty, alertness, and eager pursuit, in a context of romantic longing rather than warfare or worship.
The Suffix "-ING" — What Old English and Old Norse Actually Document
Ingwaz, the rune: the Elder Futhark and Anglo-Saxon runic traditions include a rune, ᛝ, called Ing (later Ingwaz in the reconstructed Common Germanic form), associated with a deity-name Ing (cognate with the Norse Yngvi/Freyr tradition). The Old English Rune Poem — a real tenth-century manuscript, preserved in the Cotton Otho B.x tradition (destroyed in the 1731 Ashburnham House fire but preserved in an earlier printed transcription by Hickes, 1705) — includes a stanza on this rune, traditionally rendered: "Ing was first seen among the East-Danes, till he went eastward over the waves." Scholars of Germanic religion (following the standard runological literature) read the rune's imagery as connected to fertility, harvest, and a bounded, seed-like shape — a documented scholarly reading of the poem's imagery, not a mystical claim about what the sound "-ing" does physiologically to a modern English speaker.
"Thing" — Old Norse þing. This is genuinely striking and genuinely attested: Old Norse þing meant a governing assembly, a formal gathering with legal and deliberative authority — Iceland's Althing (established 930 AD) is the direct continuation of the word and the institution, and is frequently cited as the oldest continuously-operating parliamentary institution in the world. The word's drift in English from "a formal assembly / a matter under deliberation" to "any object at all" is a real, documented semantic broadening — the kind of meaning-drift historical linguists study constantly, though calling it evidence of a deliberate "reduction of powerful language" is an interpretive flourish beyond what the etymology itself proves.
"Spell" and "spelling." Old English spell meant "story, discourse, message, saying" (compare "gospel," god-spell, "good news/story"). The modern senses — "to spell" (arrange letters) and "a spell" (a magical utterance) — both descend from this same root, by way of the verb spellian, "to tell, declare." This convergence is real and documented (Oxford English Dictionary, Etymonline). That both senses trace to one root is a genuine fact of English word-history; whether "spelling" is therefore literally "casting a spell" in any operative sense is a rhetorical extension of the etymology, not an additional linguistic fact — the honest version is: the words are cousins, and the cousinhood is real.
Hebrew Aspect, English "-ing," and an Honest Correction Already Made Once in This Collection
The Original Inquiry proposed that Biblical Hebrew has no equivalent to the "-ing" suspended-action form, and that Hebrew verbs always drive to resolution while English "-ing" traps action in permanent, unresolved motion — including reading God's own name, Ehyeh asher Ehyeh (Exodus 3:14), as proof that Hebrew grammar itself declares a "closed, resolved" I AM against English's endlessly "becoming."
This needs the same honest correction the Gathering-Up study already made once, for the same verse. Biblical Hebrew's imperfect verb form (the form underlying ehyeh) encodes aspect — ongoing, repeated, future, or incomplete action — not a metaphysical verdict of timeless completion. The Gathering-Up of All Things study (Pillar VI) already tested and rejected the stronger version of this exact claim: an adversarial fact-check, 2–1, refuted the idea that Hebrew grammar proves the divine Name is either purely static "I AM" or purely dynamic "I am becoming" — the honest finding was that the Hebrew genuinely supports both readings at once, which is why the ancient translators split (the Septuagint's egō eimi ho ōn, "I am the One who is," versus Aquila and Theodotion's esomai hos esomai, "I will be who I will be"). The same correction applies here: English "-ing" is a real grammatical form with a real function (an ongoing-aspect participle), and it is fair to note the contrast with Hebrew's different aspectual system — but "Hebrew always resolves, English always suspends" overstates both languages. Hebrew's imperfect covers open-ended, repeated, and future action constantly (it is, after all, the form used for ongoing praise, ongoing blessing, ongoing covenant-keeping throughout the Psalms). The honest claim is: the two languages build aspect differently, not that one is spiritually free and the other spiritually trapped.
אַהֲבָה (Ahavah) — A Real Root, Read Two Different Ways
The observation that heh (ה) functions as a simple, breathy exhaled sound in Hebrew, and that it appears twice in ahavah and twice in the divine name יהוה (YHWH — yod-heh-vav-heh), is a genuine feature of the Hebrew letters themselves — anyone can check it by reading the four letters in each word. Reading bet (ב), the middle letter, through its independently attested meaning "house," and building a picture — "breath, house, breath," love as "the dwelling place between two breaths" — is a real and old kind of Hebrew reading, with deep roots in Jewish homiletical and mystical tradition (this style of letter-by-letter symbolic reading is documented across midrashic and kabbalistic literature going back many centuries).
The honest genre caveat. This kind of reading is a traditional, homiletical (devar-Torah-style) practice, not a finding of modern historical-linguistic etymology. Mainstream comparative Semitic philology does not treat individual consonants as carrying fixed independent "meanings" that combine additively inside every word that contains them (the letter bet does not mean "house" every time it appears in a Hebrew word, any more than the English letter "I" means "self" every time it appears in a word). This study reports the letter-observation as real (the letters are what they are) and the "breath-house-breath" reading as a legitimate example of a real interpretive tradition — clearly distinguished from a claim about how Hebrew etymology actually works at the level of comparative linguistics.
"Logan" / "Logos," and "I" / "Eye" — Sound-Alikes, Not Kin
Two claims from the Original Inquiry deserve the same treatment the Gathering-Up study gave its own over-reaching claim (Pillar VI there): named and corrected in the open, not quietly dropped.
"Logan" and "Logos" (λόγος). They share three sounds at the front of the word and nothing else. Logan descends from Scottish Gaelic lagan ("little hollow"), a Celtic language. Logos descends from the Greek verb legō ("to speak, to reckon"), an entirely different Indo-European branch with no attested historical contact producing this word. There is no common root, no borrowing, no cognate relationship — this is homophony (sound resemblance), not etymology. It is a genuinely evocative coincidence to say out loud. It is not evidence of anything about either word's history.
"I" and "eye." In Modern English these are homophones, and the coincidence is old enough to have generated wordplay for centuries (Shakespeare uses it). But historically they are unrelated: "I" descends from Old English ic (Germanic, related to Latin ego); "eye" descends from Old English ēage (also Germanic, but from an entirely separate root meaning "eye," related to Latin oculus). Two different Old English words that happened to converge in pronunciation over centuries of sound-change — again, real coincidence, not shared origin.
What the Original Inquiry Also Explored, and Why It Is Not Carried Forward Here
In full honesty about the source material: the Original Inquiry that produced this study's raw content went on, after the name-study proper, to explore bell acoustics and historical bell-ringing practice, a reading of national flag geometry (the hexagram) tied to planetary symbolism, and a set of claims linking six-membered carbon rings in industrial chemistry to spiritual "lockedness" and five-membered rings to healing. None of that material is manuscript evidence or historical linguistics — it does not rest on an attested text, a lexicon entry, or a documented etymology — and it is not carried into this Scriptorium study, which restricts itself to what the oldest texts and the standard historical-linguistic record actually support. The Original Inquiry itself is preserved and attached alongside this document for anyone who wants the full, unedited conversation; this study is the disciplined extract of what survives contact with real sources.
The Picture That Holds
Read only what the actual etymology, actual Hebrew grammar, and actual Scripture citations support:
Logan — Gaelic soil-language for a low, sheltered hollow where things take root.
Moses — a Hebrew wordplay ("drawn out") sitting alongside a serious scholarly alternative (an Egyptian birth-name element), carried by a man Scripture itself calls the most humble on earth, who spoke with God face to face and offered his own name to save his people.
Staggs — an Old English animal-name tied, through real Hebrew poetry, to desperate longing for God (Psalm 42) and sure-footed strength on dangerous heights (Psalm 18; Habakkuk 3).
That is what survives. The rest — the sound-map of "-ing," the rune, the letters of ahavah — is real philology and real tradition, honestly labeled as exactly that: documented history of words, and a documented tradition of reading letters, not a hidden code inside a name.
A Word to the Reader
There is something worth having here without needing it to be more than it is. A name built from a hollow that shelters growth, a deliverer who drew a nation out of bondage and spoke to God as a friend, and an animal whose thirst became one of Scripture's most quoted images of longing for God — that is already a real portrait, built from real words, checked against real sources. It does not need an invented sound-map, an unrelated hexagram, or a chemistry claim borrowed from a different field entirely to be worth carrying. The discipline of naming what survives and what does not is not a smaller version of the original conversation — it is the more honest one, and it is the only kind of study this collection exists to publish.
Sources & Contested Points
| Pillar | Sources |
|---|---|
| I · Logan | Scottish Gaelic place-name dictionaries (standard toponymic references for lagan / lag); Etymonline and OED on English "logan stone" (dialectal log, distinct etymology) |
| II · Moses | Exodus 2:10 (Masoretic Text); BDB and HALOT on מָשָׁה/mashah; standard Egyptological literature on msi and royal names (Thutmose, Ahmose); Numbers 12:3 (ʿanav); Exodus 33:11; Exodus 32:32 |
| III · Staggs | Etymonline/OED on Old English stagga; Psalm 42:1, Psalm 18:33, 2 Samuel 22:34, Habakkuk 3:19, Song of Solomon 2:9,17 (Masoretic Text); standard Masoretic critical-apparatus notes on the Psalm 42:1 gender agreement |
| IV · "-ing," Ingwaz, þing, spell | Bosworth-Toller Anglo-Saxon Dictionary on -ing and cyning; the Old English Rune Poem (Hickes 1705 transcription of the lost Cotton Otho B.x manuscript); standard Old Norse dictionaries on þing and the Althing (est. 930 AD); OED/Etymonline on spell/spellian |
| V · Hebrew aspect correction | Cross-referenced to The Gathering-Up of All Things, Pillar VI (this collection); Ellen van Wolde, "Not the Name Alone," Vetus Testamentum 71 (Brill, 2021) |
| VI · Ahavah | Standard Hebrew lexicons on א-ה-ב-ה; midrashic/kabbalistic letter-symbolism tradition (general reference, not a single citable modern academic source — flagged as traditional, not linguistic) |
| VII · Logan/Logos, I/eye | Liddell-Scott-Jones (LSJ) on λόγος / legō; standard Scottish Gaelic dictionaries on lagan; Bosworth-Toller on ic and ēage |
- The origin of the name "Moses." The Exodus 2:10 wordplay and the Egyptian msi-derivation theory are both taken seriously in the scholarly literature and are not in competition to be "resolved" here — they are different kinds of claims (narrative wordplay vs. historical-linguistic derivation) that this study reports side by side.
- The Psalm 42:1 gender mismatch. Whether ʾayyal is a common-gender term for "deer" or the text has been altered from an original ʾayyalah is a genuine, unresolved question in Hebrew textual criticism.
- The meaning of the Ingwaz rune imagery. Read by runologists as fertility/harvest/seed symbolism — a scholarly reading of a poetic stanza, not a claim this study extends into physiology or "spiritual technology."
- The letter-symbolism reading of ahavah. Genuine and old within Jewish homiletical tradition; explicitly not treated here as historical-linguistic etymology.
- What is excluded (Pillar VIII). The bell-acoustics, flag-geometry, and biochemistry material from the Original Inquiry is named, not silently dropped — and named as outside this study's manuscript-and-linguistics scope, because it has no textual or etymological basis to evaluate.
A manuscript-and-etymology study built for the Scriptorium. Original Inquiry preserved and attached for reference; this document is the disciplined extract of what survives contact with real sources.