After reading name: "How do you pronounce that?"
Benet is pronounced like 'Bennett'; accent on first syllable.
The last name is pronounced DEV-er-o.
So, is that French? Are you French?
(First name): No. It's an Anglo-Saxon variant of Benedict.
I'm named after a 7th-century English monk,
St. Benet
Biscop. There is indeed a French-American writer named
Stephen Vincent Benét, but the similarity in spelling is
a historical accident: note the accent.
(Last name): Not really. It does literally mean "of Evreux" (d'Evreux),
after a town in Normandy, France, but at least my branch of the family
left Normandy with William the Conqueror to go to England and thence to
Wales and Ireland, where they lived in the County of Wexford for several
centuries, before emigrating to Newfoundland and other parts of the
New World. Not only that, but they had only been in Normandy for about
a century and a half, having invaded it from Scandinavia at that time.
So it is as French as Burke or Fitzgerald or Power: that is to say,
not very. Though I live in an officially-bilingual country with a
substantial French-speaking
population, I don't belong to it; I grew up in an anglophone city in
an anglophone family, and my French is lamentably poor.
(Me): This should be clear from the preceding paragraphs, but if you
just scanned down here, the quick answer is no. I am predominantly
Irish and English, though those are fuzzy definitions in themselves;
genetically I don't imagine there is much that distinguishes me from
any other randomly-chosen person with roots in northwestern Europe.
Age, siblings, place of origin, etc.
I'm 30; I was born in August of 1973, in London, Ontario, Canada.
I have three siblings, all older than me by at least 8 years.
What's your favourite colour?
(Short answer): Green. I like black, too, but that's not a colour.
(Long answer): I'm not entirely sure I believe in favourite colours; I
don't really have a favourite anything else (person, song, book, fungus,
piece of cutlery), but I do recall at the age of around 6 being asked
if I had a favourite colour. Even with my atrophied sense of social norms,
I got the idea that not having one would really mark me out as a serious freakazoid;
so I picked green more or less at random among the acceptable colours
for boys, and from then on was able to summon up a Favourite Colour at will.
I do now have something of a preference for green, but I'm inclined
to think that this is somewhat a posteriori.