Well, this is about as fugitive a thought as I've ever had. How I got here was by watching lots of old episodes of Murder, She Wrote. The main character's name is Jessica Fletcher. A fletcher is a maker of arrows.
There are many surnames derived from occupations: baker, weaver, miller, brewer, farmer, barber, singer, mason. There's wright (worker) and specific wrights: wheel-, cart-, and wainwright (makers of wheels, carts, and wagons); and all those woodworkers: joiner, sawyer, turner, carpenter. Some are more obscure: chandler (retailer), cooper (barrel maker), crocker (potter), draper (dry goods seller), tanner (curer of leather), tucker (cleaner of cloth). I could go on.
But I won't, because here's the point, at last -- I cannot find anybody whose last name is Printer, and I wonder why.
Could it be that printing, as an occupation, is a relative newcomer? Most of the names I've listed here go back 700 or 800 years, many of them much further than that. But we're into the 16th Century before printing becomes a regular job.
Before printing, of course, written material was painstakingly copied by hand by a scrivener (scribe). There are plenty of people named Scrivener.
But nobody named Printer.
Hmm.
And here's a post script. There are a few people whose last name is Cobbler, but lots more people whose name is Shoemaker. Now why is that, do you think?
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