by Bill Bryson
Certainly their spellings and pronunciations are often as unfathomable as those of family names. Occasionally the spellings seem to defy pronunciation—as with Meopham, a town in Kent pronounced “meppam,” or Auchtermuchty, a Scottish town pronounced “awk-ter-muck-tee”—but more often it is the other way around: The spellings look simple and straightforward, so that the innocent traveler is lulled into a sense of security, little realizing what treacheries they hide, so that Postwick is “pozzick,” Puncknowle is “punnel,” Keighley is “keethley,” Holnicote is “hunney-cut.” Cholmondeston is “chumson,” Wyardisbury is “razebry,” Wymondham is “windhum,” Flawith is “floyth.” Dent-de-Lion, a town in Kent, is pronounced “dandelion”—thus combining the old spelling and modern pronunciation of that pernicious weed.
Sometimes syllables are dropped out or blithely ignored, so that Browsholme is pronounced “brewsum,” Wavertree becomes “wawtree,” Ludgvan is “ludge-un,” Darlingscott is “darskut,” and Culzean Castle is “cullayne.” Lots of names have two or more pronunciations. Harewood in West Yorkshire has two pronunciations: “harwood” for the stately home and “harewood” for the village that surrounds it. Hednesford, Staffordshire, can be pronounced either “hedjford” or “henssford.” Shrewsbury can be “shrooz-bree” or “shroze-bree.” Athelstaneford in Scotland can be pronounced as spelled or as “elshanford.” And at least one place has two spellings and two pronunciations—Frithsden/Friesden, Hertfordshire, which can be pronounced “frizdun” or “freezdun.”
England has three villages called Houghton and each has a different pronunciation—respectively “hoton,” “hawton,” and “howton.” Oughtibridge, South Yorkshire, has four: “owtibrij,” “awtibrij,” “ootibrij,” and “ōtibrij.” Dittisham, Devon, has three pronunciations: “dittisham,” “dittisum,” “dittsum.” Adwalton, West Yorkshire, is sometimes pronounced “Atherton” because the town was formerly called Heather Town. But perhaps the strangest of all is Okeford Fitzpaine, Dorset, which many locals pronounce—for reasons no one can begin to guess at—“fippeny ockford.”
Sadly, it appears that names are more and more being pronounced as spelled—perhaps a consequence of increased mobility among the British. Pontefract, in West Yorkshire, was once pronounced “pumfrit,” but now it is always pronounced as spelled. The same fate has befallen Cirencester, which once was “sissiter” but now is usually just “siren-sester.” Grantham and Walthamstow are both pronounced with “th” sounds even though etymologically they were Grant-ham and Walt-hamstow, in which ways they were once pronounced. Curiously this does not hold true for the obscure town in Nottinghamshire called Gotham, from which New York City takes its nickname; the locals pronounce it “Gott-hum.”
And all of this isn’t even to begin to mention Wales where you can find towns and villages with names that look like Scrabble leftovers, among them Bwlchtocyn, Llwynddyrys, Cwmtwrch, Mwnt, Pwllheli, which are pronounced respectively—oh, to hell with it.
In America, obviously, there has been less time to knock the names around, but even so it has sometimes happened, usually as a result of making foreign names more palatable—changing the Ojibway Missikamaa into Michigan or the Dakota Indian šhíyena into Cheyenne. But occasionally it has happened for no real reason, rather in the English manner, as when Ricksburg, Idaho (named for one Thomas Ricks), transmogrified into Rexburg.
Nor has America had the time to come up with unpronounceable names, though there are a few around—notably Schohomogomoc Hill, New Hampshire (Algonquian for “place with fire markings near”), Natchitoches, Louisiana (pronounced “nak-uh-tosh”), and Schaghticoke, New York (pronounced “skat-uh-kohk”). However, there are many names that most Americans think they know how to pronounce that are actually pronounced differently by the locals. If you get fifteen of the following twenty names right you can consider yourself a leading authority:
Boise, Idaho
Boyce-ee
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania
Gettizburg
Pierre, South Dakota
Peer
Quincy, Massachusetts
Quinzy
Monticello, Virginia
Montisello
Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Lankus-ter
Biloxi, Mississippi
Buh-lux-ee
Yakima, Washington
Yak-im-uh
St. Ignace, Michigan
Saint Ig-nuss
Concord, Massachusetts and New Hampshire
Conk-urd (or Conkit)
Arkansas River
Ar-kan-zus
Gloucester, Massachusetts
Gloss-ter
Milan, Michigan
Mile-un
Lima, Ohio
Lye-muh
Nevada, Iowa
Nuh-vay-da
Versailles, Tennessee
Vur-sales
Vienna, Georgia
Vye-enna
Houston, Ohio
How-stun
Montevideo, Minnesota
Monna-video
Cairo, Illinois
Kay-ro
Often Americans of earlier generations found it easier to change the spellings of names rather than the pronunciations of outsiders. Thus Worcester, Ohio, became Wooster and Hertford, Connecticut, became Hartford. Many French names were quite naturally Americanized—as with Notre Dame, Detroit, Des Plaines, and St. Louis. Dutch names were equally problematic. Sometimes they required only a minor spelling adjustment, converting Haarlem to Harlem and Cape Mey to Cape May, but often they had to be pulled about like taffy until they became something altogether more palatable, so that De Kromme Zee became Gramercy and Vlacht Bos (“level forest”) became Flatbush. In Florida, by a similar process, the Spanish Cayo Hueso (“bone island”) became Key West.
However, what America does possess in abundance is a legacy of colorful names. A mere sampling: Chocolate Bayou, Dime Box, Ding Dong, and Lick Skillet, Texas; Sweet Gum Head, Louisiana; Whynot, Mississippi; Zzyzx Springs, California; Coldass Creek, Stiffknee Knob, and Rabbit Shuffle, North Carolina; Scratch Ankle, Alabama; Fertile, Minnesota; Climax, Michigan; Intercourse, Pennsylvania; Breakabeen, New York; What Cheer, Iowa; Bear Wallow, Mud Lick, Minnie Mousie, Eighty-Eight, and Bug, Kentucky; Dull, Only, Peeled Chestnut, Defeated, and Nameless, Tennessee; Cozy Corners, Wisconsin; Humptulips, Washington; Hog Heaven, Idaho; Ninety-Six, South Carolina; Potato Neck, Maryland; Why, Arizona; Dead Bastard Peak, Crazy Woman Creek, and the unsurpassable Maggie’s Nipples, Wyoming.
Many of these names, alas, have been changed, but quite a few still exist, and some places make a living out of their curious cognomens, most notably Intercourse, Pennsylvania, which does a brisk trade in double entendre postcards. Others draw crowds only occasionally, as with Eighty-Eight, Kentucky, on which attention naturally focused during 1988. One couple came all the way from Casper, Wyoming, to be married on the eighth day of the eighth month of 1988 at 8:08 P.M. in Eighty-Eight. The story goes that the town got its unusual name when the founder, one Dabnie Nunnally, reached in his pocket and found he had eighty-eight cents there. In 1948, for what it’s worth, eighty-eight people from Eighty-Eight voted for Truman and eighty-eight voted for Dewey.
It doesn’t take a whole lot, it would appear, to persuade people to change their town names. In 1950, in response to a challenge from a popular radio show, the people of Hot Springs, New Mexico, voted by four to one to rename their town Truth or Consequences. Their prize was that Ralph Edwards, the host, broadcast his tenth anniversary show from there. The thrill of that occasion was presumably short-lived, but the name has stuck. Four years later, the widow of the athlete Jim Thorpe agreed to have her husband buried in the mountain resort of Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, if the people there would rename the town after her husband, and they did. Cody, Wyoming, did the same thing for Buffalo Bill Cody.
In addition to giving places colorful names, the early settlers tended to give their states colorful—if not always terribly flattering—n
icknames. Nebraska was once called the Bugeating State and Missouri was the Puke State. Sometimes these nicknames have stuck but nobody is quite sure why. Everybody knows that Indiana is the Hoosier State, but nobody now seems to know what a Hoosier is or ever was. Similarly nobody seems too sure of why Iowa calls itself the Hawkeye State.
Often the names we know places by are nothing like the names the locals use. In Italian, it’s not Florence but Firenze, not Naples but Napoli, not Padua but Padova, not Venice but Venezia, not Milan but Milano, not Genoa but Genova. To the Danes it’s not Copenhagen but København (pronounced “koopen-howen”). To the Yugoslavians it’s not Belgrade but Beograd. To the Russians it’s not Moscow but Moskva. And to the Dutch it’s not The Hague but Den Haag. The names of countries are even more at variance with their English versions. Try covering up the left-hand column below and seeing how many you can guess.
Greece
Ellinki Dimokratia
Finland
Suomen Tasavalta
Hungary
Magyar Népköztáraság
Albania
Shqipëri
Japan
Nihon
Greenland
Kalâtdlit Nunât
Jordan
Al Mamlaka al Urduniya al Hashemiyah
South Korea
Han Kook
North Korea
Chosun Minchu-chui Immin Kongwha-guk
Morocco
Al-Mamlaka al-Maghrebia
China
Zhonghua Renmin Gonghe Guo
Sweden
Konungariket Sverige
Tonga
Friendly Islands
There are a variety of reasons for this. Sometimes the names we use are simply imposed by outsiders with scant regard for local nomenclature. Korea, for instance, is a Japanese name, not a Korean one. Hungary is a Latin name adapted from Old Russian and thus has nothing to do with the name used by the Hungarians themselves. Bosporus, the name for the strait linking Europe to Asia, is simply the Greek translation of Oxford. The local Turks call it Karadeniz Bogazi.
Often place-names arise from mishearings or misunderstandings—notably the West Indies, which of course have nothing to do with India. They simply reflect Columbus’s startling inability to determine which hemisphere he was in. Yucatán in Mexico means “What?” or “What are you saying?”—the reply given by the natives to the first Spanish conquistadors to fetch up on their shores. The term Dutch is similarly based on a total misapprehension. It comes from Deutsch, or German, and the error has been perpetuated in the expression Pennsylvania Dutch—who are generally not Dutch at all but German.
Names are in the most literal sense big business. With the increasing globalization of commerce, it is becoming harder and harder to find names that are both inoffensive and pronounceable throughout the world. Some idea of the scope of the problem can be seen in the experience of a British company when it decided to sell its vintage port, Cockburn’s Dry Tang, in Scandinavia. When it didn’t sell well in Sweden the company investigated and learned that tang means “seaweed” in Swedish, and clearly the name “dry seaweed” was not conjuring up the requisite image of quality and premium taste that would lead Swedes to buy it by the sackful. So, at the suggestion of the Swedish importers, the company changed the name on the label to Dry Cock, which sounds very silly to English speakers, but which was a big hit with the Swedes. However, sales immediately plummeted in Denmark. Urgent investigations showed that cock there signifies, of all things, the female genitalia. So yet another name had to be devised. Such are the hazards of international marketing.
Standard Oil, when it decided to change its name, considered Enco until it discovered that enco in Japanese means “stalled car.” Gallaher’s, another British company, tried to market a cigarette called Park Lane in Spain, but without much success. It wasn’t that it meant anything offensive, but Spaniards simply couldn’t pronounce it and were embarrassed to order it. On the other hand, companies do sometimes make something of a virtue of having unusual or difficult names, as with Häagen-Dazs ice cream.
Extraordinary amounts of money and effort are sometimes pumped into the naming of products. A typical example, cited by the London Sunday Times, was a Swiss confectionery company that commissioned the British trademark specialist John Murphy to come up with an arresting name for a new Swiss candy bar. With the aid of a computer spewing out random names and of groups of specialists who do little more than sit around and think up possible names, Murphy’s firm came up with 350 suggestions. But of these the company rejected 302 because they weren’t considered sufficiently zippy and delectable, and of the 48 remaining possibilities only 2 were not registered somewhere in the world. Murphy himself has had the same problem. His company is called Novamark in Britain but elsewhere trades as Inter Brand because the name was already taken elsewhere.
Because of these difficulties, brand names are heavily defended. Rolls-Royce, the car group, deals with about 500 trademark infringement cases a year (mostly plumbers advertising themselves as “the Rolls-Royce of plumbers” and that sort of thing). Other companies have been less vigilant, or at least less successful. Aspirin, cellophane, yo-yo, and escalator were all once brand names that lost their protection. Many words that are still brand names are often used by the public as if they were not—Band-Aid, Frisbee, Jell-O, Coke, Kleenex, Xerox, and, in England, Hoover, which has achieved the unusual distinction there of becoming the common term for both the appliance and the action (“Did you hoover the carpet?”). There are obvious commercial benefits in forcing your competitors to describe their products as “cola-flavored soft drinks” or “gelatin dessert.”
Despite the efforts involved in building up a good name, a little over a thousand companies a year in the United States opt to change their names. Sometimes this is because of mergers or takeovers, and sometimes, as with USX (formerly U.S. Steel) or Tambrands (formerly Tampax) it is because the company no longer wants to be associated with one particular product. And sometimes, frankly, it’s because of an ill-judged whim. In 1987, the chairman of United Airlines, Richard Ferris, spent some $7 million changing the company’s name from UAL, Inc., to Allegis. It was widely greeted as a disaster. The New York developer Donald Trump said the name sounded like the “next world class disease” [quoted in The New York Times, June 14, 1987]. After just six weeks, Ferris was deposed. One of his successor’s first moves was to change the name back to United Airlines.
Other name changes have been less disastrous but still of questionable benefit to the company. Fewer than 60 percent of people polled in 1987 knew that Esmark was an American conglomerate—about as many as remembered Swift, the name it had changed from twelve years before. Other companies whose former identities have been submerged for better or worse in new names are Unisys (formed from the merger of Burroughs and Sperry), Trinova (formerly Libbey-Owens-Ford), and Citibank (from First National City Bank).
When a company changes its name, the procedure is generally much the same as when a name is sought for a new candy bar or washing powder. Usually the company appoints a name specialist such as Novamark or Lippincott & Margulies. The specialist then comes up with several hundred or even thousand potential names. These may be suggested by employees or by panels of people chosen for the occasion, or simply churned out randomly by computers. Typically three-quarters of the names must be discarded because they are already trademarked or because they mean something offensive or inappropriate somewhere in the world.
If you are thinking of launching a new product yourself, I can tell you that among the names you cannot use are Sic, Pschitt, Plopp, and Super Piss. The first two are the names of soft drinks in France, the third is a candy bar in Taiwan, and the fourth is a Finnish deicer. Sorry.
* Entirely incidentally, a little-known fact about Shakespeare is that his father moved to Stratford-upon-Avon from a nearby village shortly before his son’s birth. Had he not done so, the Bard of Avon would instead be known as the rathe
r less ringing Bard of Snitterfield.
14.
Swearing
Among the Chinese, to be called a turtle is the worst possible taunt. In Norwegian, devil is highly taboo—roughly equivalent to our fuck. Among the Xoxa tribe of South Africa the most provocative possible remark is hlebeshako—“your mother’s ears.” In French it is a grave insult to call someone a cow or a camel and the effect is considerably intensified if you precede it with espèce de (“kind of”) so that it is worse in French to be called a kind of a cow than to be called just a cow. The worst insult among Australian aborigines is to suggest that the target have intercourse with his mother. Incest is in fact so serious in many cultures that often it need be implied in only the vaguest terms, as with tu madre in Spanish and your mama among blacks in America. Often national terms of abuse are nonsensical, as in the German schweinehund, which means “pig-dog.”
Some cultures don’t swear at all. The Japanese, Malayans, and most Polynesians and American Indians do not have native swear words. The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feelings when you stub your toe getting up to answer a wrong number at 2:00 A.M., rather oddly adopted the word ravintolassa. It means “in the restaurant.”
But most cultures swear and have been doing so for a very long time. Dr. J. N. Adams of Manchester University in England studied swearing by Romans and found that they had 800 “dirty” words (for want of a better expression). We, by contrast, have only about twenty or so, depending on how you define the term. The Rating Code Office of Hollywood has a list of seventeen seriously objectionable words that will earn a motion picture a mandatory R rating. If you add in all the words that are not explicitly taboo but are still socially doubtful—words like crap and boobs—the number rises to perhaps fifty or sixty words in common use. Once there were many more. More than 1,200 words just for sexual intercourse have been counted.
