“Dell-high, hell-high — better call it Foote-high!” -- A placename is not a place, but it can tell you something about its history. And even if you might be skeptical, it's usually a good tale.
[Place/Name (P)]
[OnePotMeal] In the town where I grew up, the one I call Salthill when I write fiction (a name with its own story, you betcha), you can tell how long someone’s lived there by what they call things.
[Fragments from Floyd] While there may be the kernel of a fact wrapped up in the names of villages, mountains, crossroads and rivers, more often than not, the names make me wonder about the part of the story that they don't tell.
[CassandraPages] Place names are supposed to tell us something about history, but how often does our own history get caught up in theirs?
[London and the North] I applaud the people in Otley who took action against the sudden appearance of the Welcome to Leeds signs outside their town. Talk about bureaucratic insensitivity!
[Bowen Island Journal] I wanted to reiterate something Robert Bringhurst wrote about the Squamish name for Bowen Island, "Xwlil Xhwm." Bringhurst referred to that name as "a stony protuberance of meaning cloaked in a forest of evergreen consonants" which of course perfectly captures the sense of the place here. "Bowen" was a British Navy captain who never saw this part of the world. "Xwlil Xhwm" is all about the creation of the earth, the transformation of humans and the origin of the black-tailed deer.
[Mulubinba Moments] The naming of our national capital, Canberra, could have been a disaster. A public call for suggestions elicited more than 700, including Kangaremu, Sydmeladperbrisho, Empire City, Democratia, Australamooloo, Utopia, Cooee, Swindleville, Gonebroke and Revenuelia.
[Feathers of Hope (Pica)] New housing developments in Davis eschew the pleasant logic of gridded streets and instead impose an arbitrary conglomeration of theme names, Disney-fashion.
[under the fire star] Living in an ex-colony, I've discovered, means that place-names are highly mutable. The funniest example came during the Vietnam War, when the American Consulate in Calcutta went to sleep on Harrington Street and woke up on Ho Chi Minh Sarani - a little joke played on the Americans by the Communist government of the state of West Bengal, which continues to this day... The city where I live was called Madras for 350 years, since the British cobbled it together from a number of existing villages... In 1996, some local politicians decided that Madras was a 'colonial' name, and should be replaced with a 'real' Tamil name, Chennai.
[Feathers of Hope (Numenius)] A note on the perils of identifying place names recorded with natural history museum specimens.
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