I don’t often name things.
I mean, I have given many things in my life over the past 30 years or so the appended description “of Love™”.
There was my Apartment of Love™. Then there was our House of Love™ down in Victorian Village during the 90s. Then when I bought my first house it was the House of of Love™ III. There was the Deluxe Luxury New Beetle of Love™. There’s the Garage of Love™ which is actually the Garage of Non-Love™. More silly than actual names.
But for me, air-cooled Beetles and Busses have inherent names that come out that somehow helps to define their personalities to me.
Murbella as a name was inspired by the car’s Mars Red paint and the gold spokes on the EMPI wheels she had when I bought her. That comes from the description of the Honored Matre Murbella, one of my favorite characters in Frank Herbert’s Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse: Dune . (We do not talk about her appearances outside of these 2 books. It is blasphemy.)
Now I’m a 3rd generation 100% Polish-American who grew up in a practically 100% Polish neighborhood in Toledo, OH and for years of my life went to Polish schools where everybody was just like me, and pretty much all of us were full on Polacks of the Polonia (the Polish Diaspora).
It wasn’t until I started going to schools that were outside of my neighborhood when the dreaded attempts to pronounce my last name would result in these awful long pauses as teachers would do roll calls and then hit the letter J and just stare blankly. Inevitably, they always butchered it, adding letters and sounds that are not there.
And my last name… Janiszewski… is actually quite simple. “Yah-nih-shev-skee” is the way I typically pronounce it, though if I’m in front of people that I know are going to have difficulty with it I’ll go with the hybrid Polish-English pronounciation of “Janus-shev-skee” but never the awful English “Janus-zoo-skee”.
So anyway, I had always joked that the project was going to be in a style I called Central Ohio Polack Look so as to never be confused with German Look or Cal Look styles.
Żuczek… literally translates to little beetle in Polish and of course seemed totally appropriate for my new car.
The yellow 74 was christened Żuczek until I decided that it just couldn’t be the source for the project. But the name is part and parcel to my vision in my head so I decided that the 72 was going to be Żuczek as well, just with a more formal name.
And Żuczek K. Brzęczyszczykiewicz was born.
The K. is sort for Käfer of course and Brzęczyszczykiewicz… well… Brzęczyszczykiewicz is there because of a scene in the Polish film Jak rozpętałem drugą wojnę światową (How I Unleashed World War II) when the main character is getting interrogated by the Gestapo and gives a fake name that is quite possibly one of the single hardest combinations of Polish phonemes ever constructed for a non-Polish familiar ear.
And thus was born the second Żuczek, fully known around the Garage of Love™ as Żuczek K. Brzęczyszczykiewicz
Just pronounce it B–zh–en–ch–sh–chy-k-y–vee–ch! 🙂