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I had a colleague once - a white South African like myself - who was always called Edel. I assumed that it was short for Edelweiss, and this worried me a lot. It said, or I thought it said, much more about white supremacy than little white Alpine flowers. She was on the right-wing side of average too, so it seemed likely that her upbringing had been ... what mine had not. Time passed. The place we were working at closed down and we all went off in different directions. After a while, I saw a reference on my office computer to this very person; I was able to look her up and see her full name, and so I did. It wasn't Edelweiss at all! Her full name was actually Elizabeth. And this made answering to Edel even more of a political statement than I'd thought it was before.

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Long, unhappy story. No. I would never, ever even think of using Edelweiss as a human or an animal name. Not in this country. It would carry far too much baggage.