I have a special fondness for Marian names, and Mercedes is one of my favorites. How many times have I wished that it wasn’t also a car brand! I loved hearing it in the movie The Count of Monte Cristo (the one with Jim Caviezel), and in high school it was given to one of my best friends as her Spanish name to be used in Spanish class.

Laura Wattenberg (the Baby Name Wizard) just blogged today about Mercedes and how such a devout Catholic name became a car brand. It was pretty fascinating — as she put it, “the emblem of German engineering [is possibly] a product of French literature, with Spanish Catholic origins, via an Austrian Jew. Nobody said names were simple.”