3.6 Descriptive names. The descriptive name is an epithet or sobriquet, the specific name carried by a person because of some distinctive attribute or something peculiar about his person. A person may be short or long, cruel or good, angry or kind, crippled or wealthy [attributive]. A person may carry a long espee, a black mantle, a cross, or a stone [metonymic]. A person may be like a fox, a bear, a goat [metaphoric]. He may have lived near a water fall (Atwater), a cliff, the shore, the end of the villiage (Townsend), a tout hill (Tuttle) [toponymic]. In any case such a person may assume these words as a personal moniker. Eventually, when society required a surname, children born to that person, or women married to him might use it as their surname. The descriptive name differed from many others by originally carrying along with it the definite article, e.g., the Short, i.e., the short one. The modern counterparts have dropped this article, e.g., Short. In other languages, the analogous phenomenon may not have resulted in dropping the article, perhaps merely making it a prefix, e.g., Leleu, i.e., the wolf, Wolffe. It may be immaterial whether a descriptive name was ever in a particular culture accepted as a “surname” per se. Deriving a surname from such a name is nevertheless useful to distinguish persons of different ancestry.