h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Upper Thong and Nether Thong are mere amateurs compared to the simplicity of Kent's unadorned Thong.

And Snodland always made me giggle, too

Now that one I like

Chipping Sodbury, I always want to swap it around to ****ing Chipbury!

Silly Australian place names fall into four main groups:

1. Aboriginal words, sounding odd because of repetition, like Wagga Wagga, Woy Woy or Grong Grong. Perfectly reasonable words, just odd to English-speakers.

2. Words that have a certain rhythm and charm, but still seem odd, like Mittagong, Wollongong, Manangatang, Wollogorang, Oodnadatta or Yankalilla (my favourite - it's quite a pretty place).

3. Words suggesting strange experiments with marsupials, like Lameroo or Pinnaroo.

4. The silliest group - names given by lost and desperate 19th century explorers. Mount Hopeless, Anxious Bay, Cactus Beach, Coffin Bay, Mount Terrible, Mount Misery, Mount Carnage, Thirsty Point (quite near Hangover Bay), and the unbeatable Mount B*ggery.

And there's more where that lot came from...

Woolfcub.

Names given by European explorers that look, in these post-Colonial times, odd and out of place, stranded on the ebb-tide of Empire...

I know this probably isn't original, but somewhere in between Easter Island and Christmas Island there must surely be an atoll called August Bank Holiday Island?

(Can't recall where I heard this idea advanced - association is to a throwaway line in a TV comedy show many years ago)

Woolfcub, you forgot the fifth category...couldn't be @rsed to think of an original name, so "borrowed" on from the old country. In this way, Melbourne ends up with a suburb called...Croydon.

Ahem, the name 'Melbourne' is in fact nicked from a south-Derbyshire market town.

So "Croydon" is a second-order borrowing, in fact? (The descendents of the people who couldn't be ar$ed perpetuating the old tradition)

What about class six - those places that change names according to how the country they're a part of changed hands, during bouts of colonial in-fighting?

Thus New Amsterdam (originally Dutch and named by stolid Dutch folk lacking originality) becomes New York (renamed on change of management by stolid English folk lacking creative originality).

There's also Class Seven - those places originally named according to a mishearing by colonists with cloth ears who mis-heard the natives and who, of course, knew better. Thus we heard "Sri Lanka" as "Ceylon" and "Myanmar" as "Burma" (our colonial ancestors must have had exceedingly cloth ears)

Perhaps even a Class Eight - place names that have changed within living memory, for no better reason than to pi$$ people off, as no other apparent reason exists for the change of a name that's served the world well and been recognisable to all since donkey's years - ie, the place we all knew as Peking suddenly became "Beijing" overnight! (I mean, can an entire city trot down to its lawyers and change its name overnight?)

Class Nine - perhaps it's good manners to use the native form of a city's name - after all, it's their country and their language, they should know best - (this might explain the Peking to Beijing thing)but the city we know as London is "Londres" to our cloth-eared neighbours in France and Spain. They've had plenty of opportunity to hear the name pronounced correctly, so why all this "Londres" crud?

Similarly, we know a city in Germany as "Cologne", which is a bit different from the native "Köln". OK, so English doesn't go in for all that Continental fannying around with accent marks and umlauts, (why over-complicate a nice simple alphabet?) but that's one variant spelling. They say "Nurnburg", we say "Nuremburg". They say München", we say "Munich". I wonder how these things come about?

Come to think of it, "Borrusia Münchengladbach" is an intrinsically silly name to non-German ears - there's just something about that!

"becomes New York (renamed on change of management by stolid English folk lacking creative originality)"

I still cling to the hope that the name 'New York' was taken from the little North Lincolnshire hamlet by the same name (or one of the many other New Yorks in the UK).

http://www.multimap.com/map/browse.cgi?X=525000&Y=355000&width=700&height=400&client=public&gride=524835&gridn=355154&keepicon=false&coordsys=gb&addr1=&addr2=&addr3=&pc=&advanced=&scale=100000&out.x=8&out.y=14

On that journey I just found the following 2 Staffordshire placenames

Wetley Rocks
Brown Edge

We do even worse in our anglicisation of Italian place names...Rome, Naples, Florence etc.

Naples is funny-sounding...sounds a bit like n*pples

And how could I forget Fiorenze, Napoli, and Roma...

I think it was Clive James who shared an Italian train carriage with American tourists, who asked if they were on the right train, as they were trying to get to Florence to see the art and culture, and they'd just realised the guy at the ticket booth had sold them train tickets to this Fiorenze place, wherever the goddam hell that was...

And of course cities change their names for political reasons - take one of Manchester's twin cities around the world, now no longer "Leningrad" but "St Petersburg". (Embarrassed the council, partly for political reasons but mainly because they had to reprint or repaint a lot of stuff about city twinning, at vast expense).

or "KarlMarxStadt", which after German unification reverted to "Chemnitz".

Then there's Volgagrad in Russia, which voted to go the other way and become "Stalingrad" again. Not so much for the bloke they're named after, but because of the battle they fought there, which I think is fair enough, but which the Russian government feels hugely embarrassed by and is trying to block because it doesn't give the wider world the appropriate image of modern Russia....

I once had an argument with a man on a train about the pronunciation of Milton Keynes.

I argued that the pronunciation was 'keens' because that's how the locals say it. He insisted it should be 'canes' because that's how the original Milton Keynes, a famous economics theorist, pronounced his name. Fair enough I said but if all pronunciations depend on the original root of the name everyone in New Orleans is getting it wrong...

F

...and all the people in New York.

It's pronounced "York", not "Yoik"

Interesting point. It's always baffled me as to why there are two neighbouring US states, where "Kansas" is pronounced with the last "s" sounded; "Arkansas" isn't, even though it's the same word with "Ar-" bunged on the front.

French pronunciations in Louisiana are understandable, as the place was French North America once, so the "New Orleans" thing is a bit of an anomaly. Surley "Nouveaux (or "Nouvelle") Orleans"?

But "Des Moines" way up north having a French name baffles slightly.

You can see it in Maine, which at least backs onto Quebec and has that excuse for French creeping in at its edges (I believe a proportion of the population of this state still speaks French as a first language?), but French names in the USA further north and west?

And then there's Theydon Bois in Essex, which is pronounced "boys". So, who are the Theydon Bois?

Theydon Bois, Theydon Bois,
Laced up boots and corduroys

I'll get me coat

Ashby-de-la-Zouche, in Leicestershire.

I think of a "zouche" as being like a "douche", but with a high-pressure nozzle...

What is a 'zouch'? I ask as Ashby is a De La Zouch, but is actually kinda near a place called just 'Zouch'. So presumably that's where it comes from there. But according to the map there is also a Zouch Fm (Oxfordshire_ and a Zouches Farm in bedfordshire, so a Zouch must mean something!

"French pronunciations in Louisiana are understandable, as the place was French North America once, so the "New Orleans" thing is a bit of an anomaly. Surley "Nouveaux (or "Nouvelle") Orleans"?

But "Des Moines" way up north having a French name baffles slightly."

Shouldn't baffle, really: http://www.louisianapurchase2003.com/home.cfm

http://www.usgennet.org/usa/ms/state/lasalle.html