American Language Supplement 2

by H. L. Mencken

  The classical place-names which engaud the map of central New York, e.g., Troy, Utica, Ithaca and Syracuse, have often been credited to Simeon DeWitt, surveyor-general of the State from 1784 to 1834, who laid out the bounty lands for Revolutionary soldiers on which they occur. But he denied in his old age that he had anything to do with the matter1 and hinted that they were actually chosen by the Commissioners of the Land Office, to wit, Governor George Clinton, Lewis A. Scott, Gerard Bancker and Peter T. Curtenius. This was at a meeting held in New York City on July 3, 1790,2 at which DeWitt was not present. There remains, however, some mystery about the business, for the names bestowed at that meeting, though they included many personal names, e.g., Brutus, Cicero, Romulus and Pompey, did not include such place-names as Troy, Utica and Syracuse. Whatever the actual provenance of the latter and in spite of the ridicule which the wits of the time heaped upon them,3 they appealed to the American imagination, and were presently imitated upon a large scale in the new West. So late as 1929 Evan T. Sage reported4 that there were still 2200 on the American map, including 31 Troys, 22 Athenses, 20 Spartas, 19 Carthages and 13 Uticas, and that they were to be found in every one of the 48 States.5

  There were similar wholesale bestowals of place-names in later years, especially after the railroads began to run everywhere. When the Southern Pacific was opened from Mojave, Calif., to the Colorado river “an alphabetical order was used – Bristol, Cadiz, Daggett, etc.”1 It was not uncommon, indeed, for the guests of the first train over a new line to be given the privilege of naming the stations along the way – most of them, of course, mere knots in the telegraph wire at that stage, but some of them substantial towns in the days following.2 The Postoffice was also active in naming new communities, sometimes by deciding between rival contenders and at other times by inventing names of its own, and the Geological Survey and later the Forest Service commonly determined the names of newly-surveyed lakes, streams, mountains and valleys.3 Washington Irving, in 1839,4 charged that “the persons employed by government to survey and lay out townships” in his day were largely responsible for the embalming of politicians’ cognomens as place-names. “Well for us is it,” he said, “when these official great men happen to have names of fair acceptation, but woe unto us should a Tubbs or Potts be in power, for we are sure, in a little while, to find Tubbsvilles and Pottsylvanias springing up in every direction.” But most such names, of course, were invented and bestowed by Tubbses or Pottses who happened to have land in the vicinity, or by their local admirers or parasites. In 1837 a writer in the New York Mirror suggested that eponymous names might be made measurably more bearable by varying their suffixes. He said:

  Take the favorite name of Pitt, for instance,1 and see in how many shapes it may be complimented without copying the familiar ones of Pittstown, Pittsfield and Pittsburg. In addition to the other common terminations of -ville, -ford, -haven, -port and -borough, we have, first, Pittstade (being the name of a place situated upon a sea or river); second, Pittstead (when the place is inland); third, Pittsteppe (when on a hill); fourth, Pittstein; fifth, Pittsdorf; sixth, Pittsdale; seventh, Pittshithe; eighth, Pittsthorpe; ninth, Pittsheim; tenth, Pittside; eleventh, Pittshame; twelfth, Pittsmore; thirteenth, Pittscliffe; fourteenth, Pittsbourne; fifteenth, Pittsleigh. The meaning of these last terminations the reader will find in Johnson’s and other dictionaries, and by altering the prefix he may coin as many names as he pleases. The word Ravenswood, for instance, thus altered, will make a dozen as fine-sounding names as the original of Scott. The master of Ravenscliffe, Ravenstein and Ravensleigh would boast as sound a title as the hero of “Lammermoor.”2

  This proposal, which was apparently made quite seriously, seems to have had no immediate effect, but in the long run it may have launched the spate of Ferndales, Stoneleighs, Woodmeres, Briarcliffes, Elmhursts and the like which began to afflict the country after the Civil War.3 The craze for such fancy names has survived into our own time, but of late it has shown some signs of abating. During the high tide of the great movement into the West, between the end of the War of 1812 and the first battle of Bull Run, it raged only among a small minority of aesthetes, chiefly clotted along the Atlantic Coast. The hearty Philistines who swarmed over the Alleghenies and then over the Rockies were quite innocent of it. In the main they were content to give their new settlements names brought from the East or fashioned of familiar materials and in time-worn patterns; for the rest, they preferred humor to poetry. This was the period which saw the founding of such surrealist communities as Hot Coffee, Miss.;4 Hog Eye, Gourd Neck, Black Ankle, Lick Skillet and Nip and Tuck, Texas;5 Social Circle, Ga.; Sleepy Eye, Minn.; Gizzard, Tenn.; Noodle, Texas; Wham and Waterproof, La.; Oblong, Ill.;6 Peculiar, Mo.;7 Santa Claus, Ind.;8 Wages, Colo.; Drain, Ore.; Goodnight, Texas; Ox, Ohio; Okay, Okla.; Grit, Ky.; Loco, Okla.; Plush, Ore.;1 Rabbit Hash, Ky.; Bug, Ky.; Bumble Bee, Ariz.; Blue Eye, Mo.; Fireworks, Ill.; Huzzah, Mo.; Ice, Ky.; Jitney, Mont.; Only, Tenn.; Rat, Mo.; Razor, Texas; What Cheer, Iowa; Wink, Texas; Zigzag, Ore.;2 Bowlegs, Okla.; Bugtussle, Texas;3 Braggadocia, Mo.; Big Arm, Mont., and Defeated, Tenn.

  The popularity of such grotesque names in the new West seems to have been first noted by James Hall (1793–1868), a Philadelphian who went down the Ohio by keelboat in 1820, settled on what was then the frontier, became a judge in Illinois, and finally engaged in banking at Cincinnati. In 1828 he published a book in which he described the new country, and in it he printed a jingle recording some of its curious nomenclature, e.g., Horsetail, Dead Man, Custard, Brindle and Raccoon.4 But it was after the plains and Rockies were crossed that the pioneers really spit on their hands and showed what they could do. Many of their inventions have become part of the romantic tradition of the Pacific Coast and have thus taken on a kind of improbability, but Humbug Flat, Jackass Gulch, Gouge Eye, Red Dog, Lousy Level, Gomorrah,5 Shirt Tail and Hangtown were very real6 and so late as 1876 Henry T. Williams was printing a long list which included Ragtown, Dead Mule, Chucklehead, One Eye, Puke, Rat-Trap, Port Wine, Ground Hog’s Glory, Nigger Hill, Blue Belly, Swellhead, Centipede, Seven-by-Nine, Gospel Swamp, Nary Red, Gas Hill, Paint Pot, Pancake, Chicken Thief, Hog’s Diggings, Shinbone, Poodletown, Puppytown, Git-Up-and-Git and Poverty Hill.1 In the years since then many of these names have been changed to more elegant ones,2 and others have vanished with the ghost towns they adorned, but not a few still hang on. Indeed, there are plenty of lovely specimens to match them in the East, in regions that were also frontier in their days, e.g., the famous cluster in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania: Bird in Hand, Bareville, Blue Ball, Mt. Joy, Intercourse and Paradise.3 Pennsylvania also has towns named Cyclone, Cypher, High Dry, Holiday, Local and Obelisk, and I have heard of one named Poison, though it is not on the maps. Hog Island, Pa., which got into the newspapers often during World War I, had namesakes in Virginia, Texas, Maine, New York, Vermont and Massachusetts. Maryland has a Blue Ball to match Pennsylvania’s, and also a Basket, a Bald Friar, a Fiery Siding, an Issue, a Number Nine, a Gott and a T.B. New Jersey has a Dolphin, a Seaboard, a Straws and a Wall.

  The new State of Michigan, admitted to the Union on January 26, 1837, sought to stem the tides of nomenclatomania then running by enacting a law forbidding calling a town “after any other place or after any man without first obtaining the consent of the Legislature.” “The consequence is,” said a writer in the Providence Journal later in 1837,4 that Michigan is destitute of London, Paris and Amsterdam. Unlike her sister States she boasts neither Thebes, Palmyra, Carthage or Troy. No collection of huts with half a dozen grocery-stores has been honored with the appellation of Liverpool, nor has any embryo city, with a college or an academy in contemplation, received the name of Athens. She is the only State but has a Moscow and a Morocco in the same latitude, and an Edinburgh and an Alexandria within thirty miles of each other. Babylon, Sparta and Corinth, though they have been transplanted to every other part of the Union, are destined never to flourish on the soil of Michigan. No Franklin or Greene or Jeffe
rson, which would make the five hundredth, no Washington, which would make the ten thousandth of the same name, is to be found in her borders.

  This writer, alas, was too optimistic, for the law turned out to be as unenforceable as the Volstead Act, and at the present moment Michigan has a London, a Paris, a Palmyra, a Troy, an Athens, a Sparta, a Moscow, a Franklin and a Washington, to say nothing of a Rome, a Dublin, an Oxford, a Turin, a Sans Souci, a Topaz, a Payment, an Eden, a Zion and a Dice. It was not, in fact, until more than half a century afterward, on February 15, 1890, that any effective effort was undertaken to bring place-names under official regulation. On that day Captain H. F. Picking, the hydrographer of the Navy, set up a board in his office to consult with the hydrographers of foreign nations about the forms and spellings of names appearing on mariners’ charts. The British Admiralty had published rules of its own in 1885, and Captain Picking’s board was soon in communication with the Admiralty authorities, and with those of France, Germany, Spain, Canada, Chile, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Mexico, Japan and China. The result was a report published by the Navy Department in 1891.1 It dealt wholly with foreign place-names, but its preparation naturally suggested the need of a similar study and control of American names, and on September 4, 1890 President Benjamin Harrison appointed a United States Board on Geographic Names consisting of representatives of the Postoffice, the Smithsonian, the Hydrographic Office of the Navy, the Engineer Corps of the Army, the Lighthouse Board, the State Department, the Geological Survey, and the Coast and Geodetic Survey. The authority of this board, at the start, was confined to settling disputes regarding place-names which arose in the departments, but on January 23, 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt widened its scope by charging it with “the duty of determining, changing and fixing” all such names “within the United States and insular possessions,” and a little later its name was shortened to United States Geographic Board. Representatives of the General Land Office, the Government Printing Office, the Census Bureau, the Biological Survey and other agencies were added to it from time to time, and it continued to flourish until 1934. It issued frequent announcements of its decisions, and in 1933 published an 834-page report in which all of those reached down to 1932 were assembled.

  Unfortunately, it was treated parsimoniously by an otherwise lavish government. Down to 1917 it had no appropriation of its own, but fed its members out of the salaries they got from the various departments, and down to 1929 it had no paid secretary.1 On April 17, 1934, as an incident of the departmental reorganization then in progress, it was abolished, its functions were transferred to the Interior Department, and it there reappeared as the United States Board on Geographical Names. For some time it seems to have escaped the notice of the idealists then fashioning a new world, and so late as 1935 its staff was confined to an executive secretary, an assistant and a clerk. But then its potentialities were grasped by the forward-looking Secretary of the Interior, the Hon. Harold L. Ickes, and after Pearl Harbor it began to move into high gear. On February 25, 1943, it was reorganized with a director at $8,000 a year, an assistant at $5,000, two grand divisions of five sections each, a staff of geographers and philologians, and a working force of 110 altogether.2 During the war years it naturally gave most of its attention to foreign place-names, for the Army and Navy were then penetrating to many far places, and where even the Army and Navy could not go airships were carrying agents soliciting clients for Lend Lease. Thus the board, in July, 1945, brought out a brochure on Tibet by which it appeared that the proper spelling of the name of the Tibetan village lying at the intersection of Lat. 27° 30’N and Long. 85° 14’E was Mendong Gomba, not Mendong Gompa, and that to call it Men-tung-Ssu was altogether incorrect. Other brochures dealt with the place-names of Mongolia, Portuguese Timor and the Lesser Sunda islands, but those of the United States were rather neglected, and nearly all of the few dealt with were the names of mountains, rivers, etc., not of inhabited places.

  With the end of the war, however, the board returned to its home grounds, and since then it has been carrying on the work of getting something approaching order into the American map. Like its predecessor, it seems to be determined to knock all apostrophes out of the national place-names, even at the cost of logic. Thus the county in Maryland which was St. Mary’s for centuries is now St. Marys and the county which used to be Prince George’s is Prince Georges.1 Why the s was not deleted with the apostrophe I do not know. In various foreign names, e.g., that of St. John’s, the capital of Newfoundland, the board has been constrained to retain the apostrophe, but not within the continental limits of the United States.2 Accents appear to be similarly doomed. What was once Santa Fé, N. Mex., is now plain Santa Fe, though Santa Fé in Argentina remains unshorn. So with Wilkes-Barre, Pa., once -Barré. So with San José, Calif. So with Coeur d’Alêne, Idaho. The board also advocates simplified spelling and has changed centre to center in many town-names, and lopped the final h from -burgh,3 and dropped many a redundant City, -town and -ville.

  But in one respect, at least, it is conservative: it gives no countenance to such clumsy collision forms as Jonespoint,4 Annarbor, Limesprings, Burroak, Wallawalla and Coscob.5 Also, it frowns upon the false delicacy that wars upon picturesque old names. Its predecessor consented to changing the name of Dishwater Pond in New Hampshire to Mirror Lake, but it resisted the visionaries who sought to change Cow Creek on the Chesapeake into Big Creek, Ironjaw Lake, Mich., into Crescent Lake, and Cat Island, Mass., into Lowell Island. In general, however, it tries to follow local desires, and when a village or natural object has a name which arouses mirth it usually gives its imprimatur to a change. Thus it consented to turning Muskrattown, Md., into Little Georgetown, Bug Lake, Minn., into Herriman Lake, and Great Gut, Va., into Houseboat Creek. In most such cases it finds support for its decisions in local history or legend. In the matter of foreign names it has favored using native forms of the names of towns, e.g., Firenze, ’s Gravenhage and München, on outgoing mail in order to facilitate ultimate delivery, but the usual English forms for the names of countries, e.g., Germany, Greece and Switzerland, to facilitate sorting in the American Postoffice. It apparently looks forward to the day when the American names for foreign cities, e.g., Florence, The Hague, Naples, Vienna and Munich, will disappear altogether, but that day is not yet.1

  The synthetic place-name seems to be indigenous to the United States: it may be encountered, now and then, elsewhere, but it must surely be rarely. Characteristic examples are Texarkana (Texas + Arkansas + Louisiana),2 Penn Yan (Pennsylvanian + Yankee), Reklaw (Walker spelled backward), Wascott (W. A. Scott), Paragould (W. J. Paramore and Jay Gould), Carasaljo (Carrie + Sally + Josephine), and Asco (Atlantic Smokeless Coal Company). Of the first class there are many examples along the borders of the States, e.g., Kenova (Kentucky + Ohio + West Virginia),3 Texhoma (Texas + Oklahoma), Calexico (California + Mexico), Kanorado (Kansas + Colorado), Dakoming (Dakota + Wyoming), Nosodak (North Dakota + South Dakota), Mardela and Delmar (Maryland + Delaware), Delmarva or Delmarvia (Delaware + Maryland + Virginia),1 Arkana (Arkansas + Louisiana), Tennga (Tennessee + Georgia,2 Viropa (Virginia + Ohio + Pennsylvania), Pen-Mar (Pennsylvania + Maryland), Vershire (Vermont + New Hampshire), Moark (Missouri + Arkansas), and Nypenn (New York + Pennsylvania).3

  All the other varieties of blend-names show numerous examples. Hamill Kenny reports Ameagle (American Eagle Colliery), Anjean (Ann + Jean), Champwood (Champ Clark + Woodrow Wilson), Cumbo (Cumberland Valley Railroad + Baltimore & Ohio Railroad), Itmann (I. T. Mann), Mabscott (Mabel + Scott), and Gamoca (Gauley + Moley + Campbell) from West Virginia;4 Fred I. Massengill reports Maryneal (Mary + Neal), Alanreed (Allen + Reed), Fastrill (Farrington + Strauss + Hill), Gladstell (Gladys + Estell), Normangee (Norman G. Kittrell), Saspamco (San Antonio Sewer Pipe Company) and Tesnus (sunset spelled backward) from Texas,5 and Dorothy J. Hughes reports Alkabo (alkali + gumbo), Cando (from We can do), Golva (Golden Valley), and Seroco (a memorial of the fact that the first piece of mail r
eaching the village postoffice was a Sears Roebuck catalogue) from North Dakota.6 Some curious specimens are to be found in other States, e.g., Benld in Illinois, a blend of Benjamin L. Dorsey; Westkan in Kansas, from West Kansas; Miloma in Minnesota, a blend of Milwaukee and Omaha, not formed directly from the names of the two cities, but from those of the Milwaukee Chicago & St. Paul and the Chicago, Minneapolis and Omaha Railroads; Marenisco in Michigan, from Mary Relief Niles Scott; Centrahoma, from central + Oklahoma; Ladora in Iowa, from la, do and re of the musical scale; Ardenwald in Oregon, from Arden Rockwood, with the last syllable translated into German; Ti in Oklahoma, made up of the initials of Indian Territory reversed; Pawn in Oregon, the initials of Poole, Aberley, Worthington and Nolen;1 Marhattianna in Oklahoma, from Mary, Hattie and Anna; E. T. City in Utah, named for E. T. Benson, “an early miller and Mormon official,” and Veyo in the same State, “coined from the words verdure and youth by a group of Mormon Beehive Girls.”2 Another American invention is the addition of Courthouse or Court House to the name of a county-town. Such forms are more prevalent in Virginia, but they are also to be found in New Jersey and North Carolina.3 The low amperage of patriotic passion during World War II saved twelve of the thirteen Berlins in the United States from rechristening. The one casualty was Berlin, Ala., which became Sardis.4 An effort by Easterners to induce the people of Berlin, Ore., to change its name to Distomo was rejected at a mass-meeting on October 10, 1944.5 But the name of Kobe, Alaska, was apparently changed to Rex in 1944.6