Destinations have names and names are unreliable. They may be unjustifiably fascinating in themselves, misleading or evocative of fantasy. I refuse to explore their roots; imagination beats reality every time.
Yorkshire. Muker is a village where people are constantly vomiting. In Giggleswick, nothing is taken seriously. Cakes in Pontefract turn out to be flexible discs of liquorice.
I lived in London because of the names. Who was Arno of Arnos Grove and where did his apostrophe go? Osterley is out west not east as one might expect. Theydon Bois may have been transplanted from Clichy, a Paris suburb. Is Pinner a low-paid job? It would be amusing if Upney turned out to be marshy.
Further afield now. I stayed the night in Puerto Ordaz, Venezuela, worrying about knife-toting hidalgos. Dirty jokes ran through my mind when I landed at Bangkok. Comfortably off I avoided Poverty Bay, was certified in Doubtful Sound, disappointed by Ninety-Mile Beach (all NZ).
The USA provided a rich harvest. The Monongahela and Allegheny rivers meet in Pittsburgh not to form the Ohio river but a bel canto opera in Welsh or Italian. New Yorkers reduce the grandiosely titled Avenue of the Americas to Sixth Avenue. Parts of Mystic (Conn) are straightforwardly beautiful. In my hotel on El Camino Real (SF), I took off my crown and slept well (Courtesy, WS). A railway runs through Statesboro (Ga) to provide a wrong side of the tracks. Kennedy Airport used to be Idlewild; any reason why Heathrow shouldn’t be Grant Shapps Field? Intercourse (Pa) is, I believe, in Amish country; the Amish are devout and eschew zipped flies; some dysfunction here.
That celestial beauty, the Moon, incorporates the clumsily named Mare Humboldtianum. Astronomers needn’t read music but must not have tin ears.
There is a hamlet near here called 'Thingley'. I think that someone must have forgotten its real name somewhere down the line.
ReplyDeleteTom: That at least has comic undertones. A decade ago I ran a local area magazine and was struck by the uninspired names attached to many of the streets on the largish estate where I live (The Meadows, Priory View, Northolme Road). I tackled this with Hereford's principal building control surveyor, whose responsibility this was. It turns out the developers dream up the names and submit them to the Council. Thus blandness becomes a virtue; no one is keen to rock the boat. I for instance live on Dorchester Way; nothing wrong with that except it's geographically irrelevant; Dorchester is not surprisingly in Dorset.
ReplyDeleteOne developer went too far. As the houses went up the company's chairman died. To accord him some kind of post-mortem celebrity, they used his name to label one of the streets. Give developers an inch and they'll grab a rod, pole or perch. Could have been worse. The street could have been named after a local politician, always a dangerous ploy. No guarantee that a pol's reputation will continue to be blameless, even if it started off that way..
Interesting names you have posted here. The one that made me google around was Mare Humboldtianum. The small town I live on the California north coast is located in Humboldt County. Mmm? Made me wonder if there was a connection. Apparently my county and the lunar mare are related, both named for Alexander von Humboldt. He is described as a prominent explorer of unknown lands. I love this connection. Thank you!
ReplyDeleterobin andrea: I knew about Humboldt the explorer. What fretted me was that in attempting to pay tribute to him - turning his two-syllable surname into a five-syllable Latin adjective/noun - the person doing the lunar christening seemed unaware of the ugliness of the end result. But then there is a scientific tradition for this. The earlier entries in the Table of Elements are often rather beautiful (Tellurium, Cobalt, Fluorine) even poetic. The later (ie, more recent) additions are much more clumsy (Roentgenium. Livermorium) - as if modern scientists were less attuned to the potential beauties of English.
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