A Place by Any Other Name

Names are funny things. Sometimes they don't quite fit and we have to invent new ones that somehow describe more aptly. That is how my kids became Mad, Boogie and the Pootle.

But it's not just names of people that I think about; place names can be interesting too. I wonder sometimes why all the towns that grew to be great cities always seem to have sensible, natural-sounding names. New York, for instance, would have been acceptable under its original name, New Amsterdam, but what if it had been named New Snoring instead? Would we accept that as happily into our vision of the world? Don't laugh, there really is a Snoring, well two actually (Little Snoring and Great Snoring), in Norfolk, England.

How come the places that get named after tiny villages in the old countries never manage to become great and famous cities? We might have had New Upper Piddle (Worcestershire), the great city on San Francisco Bay, or New Clapham, the center of America's car industry. Would we become used to those names and forget how funny they sound?

And what if America's great general of the War of Independence hadn't been named Washington but Pratt or Finkelbaum? Presumably the capital of the States would now be Pratt DC or there'd be a state in the northwest corner called Finkelbaum. And what if the British Home Secretary after whom Sydney, Australia, was named had actually been Lord Ponsonby-Smythe? If Lady Jane Grey had succeeded in her bid for the crown and begun a new line of Queen Janes, there might be a state in Australia called Jane, a Jane Falls on the Zambezi River, and we'd look back to the time when Britain was great - the Janian era.

It does seem incredibly lucky that all the great cities of the world have turned out to be named fairly sensibly. There is only one example that I can think of where a city has come very close to having a silly name: Pietermaritzburg, the capital of Natal Province in South Africa, named after two Boer heroes, Piet Retief and Jan Maritz. And even that is fairly imposing, I suppose.

Why don't the Dry Gulches and Disappointments ever grow into huge metropolises? Is there some force at work that automatically prevents towns with humorous or strange names ever becoming major urban centers? And how do people know that the little settlement they founded will one day be a massive urban sprawl? Because they do, you know. Take Kansas City, for instance. To have claimed that name, the founders must have foreseen the future.

Admittedly, there are a few instances of mistakes being made, Texas City for example. Obviously the founders had big ideas that never quite came to fruition. Perhaps their crystal ball had a crack in it.

Generally, however, it seems that the founders got it right. If they had decided to start the city just a few miles to the south, Chicago might now be known as Kankakee. Was it just chance that they picked a place where they could have a rather more respectable name?

America is full of possibilities that have somehow never achieved their potential. There might have been great cities named Pigeon Forge, Tennessee; Bucksnort, Tennessee; Paradox, Colorado; Cut and Shoot, Texas; Pflugerville, Texas; Mexican Hat, Utah; West Thumb, Wyoming; Bar Nunn, Wyoming; McNutt, Wyoming. How sad it is that all these have been passed over in favor of the Houstons, the Memphises and Birminghams.

It looks statistically impossible, this matter of cities always having stolid, no-nonsense names. Surely, out of all the Bostons, Melbournes, Londons, Philadelphias, Atlantas, there ought to have been at least a few Bottom Bends, Last Chances or Cholomondeleys? But no, some vast, invisible force either prevents us giving future cities silly names, or makes sure that funnily-named towns never grow.

There might be a useful principle here, something that founders of new towns could use. If you wanted your town to stay small, you could ensure this by giving it the stupidest name you could think of. But, if you have grand ambitions, think of a name that sounds important and rolls off the tongue. That should guarantee success.

Of course, now that we've discovered this hitherto-unexpected force that governs the naming of places, we ought to name it. How does "the Gone Away Conurbation and Settlement Nomenclature Principle" sound?