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[Surname] Lipscomb name
Years ago a high school teacher located a book of semantics for surnames. That book spoke of the first part of the name referring to the family of “Phillip.”
Phillip was a “lover of horses.” Therefore if you were searching for horses, you looked for Phillip in the valley bellow the “Combes” or limestone cliffs
What happened to that information in semantics I wonder.
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Everyone was too embarrassed to publish it again. A comb or combe is a basin, referring to a household article, a unit of measure, or a geographical feature resembling a basin, not limestone cliffs or a valley below limestone cliffs. In actuality, it seems they've started with a place name, and attempted to engineer a fanciful meaning, when in fact the meaning is simple. In OE the place is recorded variously as hlíp-cumb, hlýp-cumbe or hlýpcumbe, literally "leap-basin", a "leap" in reference to a salmon jump, a steep fall in a stream. Thus hlip-cumb, is a geological basin surrounded by steep sides or cliffs (perhaps they were limestone, but that's irrelevant to the meaning). At some point it's been equated with several places known as Luscombe or Loscombe, from Hlos-combe — a combe used as a "looze" or pigsty, and gained a misplaced "s".
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