If you have ever taken an interest in heraldry, and more particularly, Scottish heraldry, there will have been a moment when you have asked yourself: what’s with the naked guy??
The coat of arms of Dalziel is heraldically described as “Sable, a man’s body proper” – which is to say, black, with a naked guy on it. It should be noted that “proper” in heraldic terms refers to something being displayed in its natural colour – a lion vert is green; a lion proper is yellow – rather than any armorial judgement on the inappropriateness or otherwise of full frontal nudity.
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Whether the naked man is proper in non-heraldic terms is one question. The larger question, of course, is what on earth is he doing there? Who thought this was a good idea?? And why???
The story goes that many many years ago, back in the reign of King Kenneth “Kinslayer” the Second, i.e. not long before dates went from having three digits to having four, a beloved kinsman of King Kenneth the Kinslayer was slain – not, in this case, by Kenneth – and he was Not Amused. (King Kenneth, that is, though the kinsman was probably not amused either.)
Kenneth II was at war with the Picts at the time, and the Picts had taken the Dearly Beloved Kinsman prisoner of war, and then, having never heard of the Geneva Convention (due to it being still about a thousand years away) had executed him. Finally, just to rub it in, they hung his body up (naked) where it could be seen from the Scots’ encampment.
King Kenneth was not unnaturally irate, and wishing to make a retaliatory point by snaffling the deceased D. B. Kinsman back again, asked for volunteers. This was the sort of raid which was fraught with hazard and peril, which is why he wasn’t doing it himself. Going on a practically certain death mission can be viewed as quixotically brave in the rank and file; for a king it just looks like poor leadership. The Scots had a very low tolerance for poor leadership, to judge by the number of Scottish kings whose biographies in ancient annals end with “a suis occisus est” – Latin for “killed by his own”.
The number of Scots looking for a reputation as quixotically brave was not high, however, and the king’s request for volunteers met at first with a shuffling silence of Scots wondering if they’d left the iron on.
But then one chap – name unspecified – spoke up and said “I dare” – or rather, being Scottish, “dal zell” and promptly went and did it.
The king was tremendously pleased, and showered the quixotically brave unnamed chap with rewards. The family not only took the words “I dare” as their motto, they also took Dalziel as their family name, thus covering up whatever name they’d used hitherto. (Peebles?) History does not relate what the newly renamed Mrs Dalziel thought of the change, nor her opinion on suddenly having a naked man showing up in all the places coats of arms appear in the lives of the armorial classes.
The second great mystery, of course, is why the far-flung house of Dalziel can’t agree on how to pronounce their name. Pronunciations include Dal-zell, Dee-ell, Dall-yell, and doubtless others.
The problem, it turns out, is at least partly one of typography. The name Dalziel – like certain other Scottish names which have a z in them – was originally spelled with a yogh. This sounds rather like an English y, but looks more like an English z.
Some branches of the family used a y, thus becoming Dalyells, keeping closer to the original pronunciation. But others started spelling it with a z – Dalziel or Dalzell or even Dezell – and then some of them started pronouncing it as though it had an actual z in it, since it kind of did, at least when written down. Other branches of the family were merely irritated by non-Dalziels assuming that a name with a z in it should be pronounced with a z in it, which is Clearly Wrong.
But if any Dalziels-pronounced-Dalyells or Dalziels-pronounced-Dalzells or any other flavour of Dalziel get asked too many awkward questions about why their surname is spelled and/or pronounced the way it is, they can always change the subject by introducing a spot of full frontal heraldry.