“Hi: you're Caleb, right?”
I'm bartending Sunday brunch. I've never met the guy who has just sat down at my bar before, but he's the friend of a friend, and I know of him.
He gives me the generous smile of the beautiful. Hey, I get it; it's nice to be recognized. Nor am I immune: I, too, feel the gravitational pull of that attraction.
We banter a little. He's pretty full of himself, but I find myself liking him anyway. Ah, the privilege of beauty.
“Fine old Hebrew name, Caleb,” I say.
He favors me with another radiant smile. “It means 'faithful and true,'” he informs me solemnly.
Hm. Well, that may be so, but only in a derived sense: the kind of euphemistic meaning that you find in books of baby names, maybe.
I don't tell him that I know more about his name than he apparently does. I don't tell him that I speak Hebrew. (Hey, it's a fine old pagan language, with its own words for “standing stone” and “stone circle”; old enough that a name that has since become a term of abuse, originally bore a more favorable sense.) I don't tell him that his name actually means “dog.”
Sometimes the greater wisdom lies in not telling.