The nearby Wakarusa River (a tributary of the Kansas River) gets its name from an Indian legend where a woman crossing the river exclaimed that it was “hip deep”. A locally-favored looser translation is “the water is up to my ass.”
It is always popular to destroy some natural, scenic, or historic resource in the name of “progress” and then to make it all okay by naming the new development after whatever was destroyed.
In the community of Los Osos (“The Bears”), CA, there are groves of eucalyptus trees that are a famous stop-over point for vast swarms of migrating monarch butterflies. A few years ago (like, around 1995 or so?) they tore down an entire patch of one such grove to build an elementary school there, over much local protest. Of course, they named the school “Monarch Grove Elementary School”.
These are probably “soft hyphen” marks that you can insert into a formatted document to indicate points where the word may be hyphenated. They will normally not be visible in the formatted text, but if the software decides it must break the word onto two lines, these are the points where it may do that. (ETA: Otherwise, a formatter may get its hyphenation rules from its spell-check dictionary, which typically also includes hyphenation points.)
Also, BTW, there is at least one place named Llano in Ca, out in the Mojave Desert.
Cool, thanks for pointing that out. So it’s a built-in feature of web design and word processors?
Right. In HTML markup, it’s ­ among other codings.
Wikipedia has more:
Several people have mentioned places on Long Island (NY), but then there’s Long Island itself. It is what it’s called, an island 118 miles long.
And the chief city in that county, Akron, also means “high place”.
Lots of the Cleveland suburbs have descriptive names. Lakewood, where I live, is certainly on the lake, and would have been forested at the time of its first settling. Next town west is Rocky River, named after the river that forms its border with Lakewood (and of course, the river’s name is also descriptive). Past that is Bay Village, which is literally on a bay. South of Rocky River is Fairview Park, which is also right up against the same river, in an area where that leads to some great views. On the other side of town, there’s Eastlake, which is on the lake and east of Cleveland (unfortunately, while there’s a Westlake over this way, it’s south of Bay Village, and so not on the lake itself). And a number of the suburbs and exurbs have names of the form Falls or Heights, all of which are descriptive (though the Something part may not be).
And between Cleveland and the high point of the canal, there’s Portage, which marked the point, pre-canal, where you’d have to take a canoe out of the water and carry it over land to a south-flowing river.
EDIT: Oh, and a nitpick: It’s the Ohio-Erie Canal. The Erie Canal is entirely within New York.
And Waikiki means “spouting water.”
Tucson is from the Tohono O’odham language - and means the black mountain, or something like that.
Portage, Wisconsin was named that because it was a good spot to portage between the Fox and Wisconsin rivers.
The Grand Canyon is named after a really grand canyon.
Table Mesa Rd. is named after a table that looks like a table.
The Rincon Market is indeed on the corner.
Isn’t a name like “Table Mesa” redundant?
I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned that Mississippi means “big river” or “great river” in the Ojibwe language.
Boundary Bay: a bay with a boundary running through it. 
Sunnyvale, California is a place that is often sunny among places that are often foggy.
Something makes me think you live on Whidbey.
Pennsylvania of course means Penn’s woods, which is a reasonable description.
Then again, there is the Rio Grande, which means the same thing in Spanish. Although, 90% of the time, it is neither big nor great. According to legend, the guy who named it discovered it during the flood season, when it is “a mile wide and an inch deep”.
Don’t live there, but dream about it a lot. Used to live nearby.
Indeed. In another thread here a few weeks ago, someone gave the example of “The La Brea Tar Pits” in Los Angeles. As “La Brea” means “the tar” in Spanish, the name winds up being “The The Tar Tar Pits.”
Arches National Park.
It does not appear that Atascadero, Ca. has been mentioned yet in this thread. From a post I wrote about a year ago on the subject of weird city names:
That post, in full: