A Sunday afternoon walk through a nearby small town became the reminder for a post long planned and equally long forgotten.
Naming of places and streets in recent decades.
A lot can be said about how places get named as well as re-named in the modern Western states. Or not renamed, as one episode of British TV show Time Team demonstrated when they dug up a one thousand year old leper hospital outside of a modern town: the area is named Hospital Field to this day.
We will stay away from commenting on naming streets after persons living or dead, and we won't go into details of the more creative naming, such as Infinite Loop. By the same logic, we will not explain why one or more neighborhoods in German cities have earned the nickname "hangman's neighborhood".
What is left is small town middle of the road naming.
On the stroll, we walked along Maple Drive, Oak Street, and Spruce Lane without thinking about the street names.
Only half way down Hill View did the naming issue creep into the conversation.
Have you noticed how we tend to name places after what we destroyed when we brought in the bulldozers?
Hm, but you do see the hill.
Check again, will you? You can see the hill from the street when you are in this one spot behind us but not from back here.
This was true. And oddly enough, there were no maples on Maple Drive or oaks on Oak Street. Though were were a couple of small oaks on Maple Drive, but hey.
Sure, there is no requirement or need for practical or truthy street names, yet, over here in Europe it is almost inconceivable to apply the super practical American ordinal numbering system to streets.
Even in brand new cities like the so called garden cities of post World War II England. They just wouldn't go for it.
The one German city with a very different naming system, Mannheim, has a chess board layout and naming of the city center.
Do you know a little bit of chess? How does this sound: Pedestrian from P1 to O5?
Arguing that Europeans use plant names as easy and historically somewhat permanent names does make some sense, but even very odd names (to our ears) can stick around for a very long time.
Honestly, would you expect the surf forecast for Shit Creek to be anything but a parody website?
And Hill View, then?
It certainly beats the much more objectively descriptive names we came up with, such as Freeway Ruckus or the tongue in cheek Red Light Lane [after the red aircraft warning lights on the wind mills at night].
Freedom Fries anybody?
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