Bíró
A couple of days back I heard my boss say something about a biro (by-roh). Unsure of what she was referring to, I looked it up - and found google search results showing some ball-point pens from a company called bic, available readily on Amazon. I dismissed my search soon thereafter, a bit let down by it being just a ball-point pen and not something fancier that I had hoped it would be! As it turns out, I had dismissed the biro too soon. Today, Google commemorated Ladislao José Biro's 117th birthday through a doodle. He is the inventor of the biro or the ball-point pen as it was hitherto known to me. Upon clicking the doodle to find out more about him, I came across the name László József Bíró - which I immediately recognised as a Hungarian name. José, on the other hand, was a very Spanish name. Intrigued by this duality in names, I continued reading the articles that came up in the search results. László József Bíró was indeed a Jewish Hungarian who had had to flee from H...