Somewhere along the way I read/heard that some foreigner was asked to select the most mellifluous English language word and he picked “cellar door.” Go figure.
As a child I saw a movie title (not the actual movie itself) “Blood on the Moon” and for many years thought that was the coolest thing of all.
I had a little thing I would say when stuff was way more than a little spooky: “Blood and greed and doom.”
There was a history professor at the school I attended name Constantine Bellissari whose name I liked a lot.
I liked “Republica Dominicana” and “puertoricense” from Spanish class.
I also love the SDMB username Rowrbazzle. I don’t know anything about the poster Rowrbazzle, but I love his/her name. I think of it all the time. I get all excited when I see the name in a thread…I should start paying more attention to the content of the posts underneath
In case you didn’t know, “rowrbazzle” is what the characters in Pogo would say when they got really irritated. (Mostly Albert, I think, but others as well.)
I always thought Burma seemed to have a lot of cool names, like Rangoon and Irrawaddy. (Of course, Burma is now called Myanmar, which I consider one of the most ungainly place names around.)
There are a whole lot of fun-to-say place names, most of which I can’t think of right now… let’s see:
Popocatepetl
Vientiane
Quintana Roo
Novosibirsk
Sulawesi
Kalimantan
Eleuthera
Medical terms sometimes sound so pretty…until you learn what they mean. One of my favorites is atelectasis, (“at-uh-LEK-ta-sis”), which sounds like a lovely girl’s name, but means the collapse of alveoli in the lungs that leads to pneumonia. Cachexia (“kuh-KEX-ee-a”), which I think would make another great girl’s name, means the wasting and loss of muscle mass that often accompanies cancer treatment.
I used to drive between Chicago and St. Louis regularly. I always got a kick out of the sign for Towanda, IL. I always had to yell “TOWANDA!” at the top of my lungs as I drove by. Another favorite sign, somewhere in Missouri, is a highway exit sign that points to the towns of Imperial and Kimmswick. I love that combination of place names. “Imperial Kimmswick” sounds like a charming elf city in a fantasy novel.
For reasons that aren’t really clear to me, Mr.Q. loves the name of the former Cardinals’ outfielder, So Taguchi. His very casual interest in baseball was greatly lessened when Mr. Taguchi was released several years ago.
I always thought ambergris sounded like a girl’s name, ‘Amber’ for short.
In the town where I went to college, there’s a freeway exit for Sleater-Kinney Rd., the band took their name from the street.
Within the space of a year, or so, I knew a Robin Boccabella and a Heather dellaMare, both great names.
I was perusing a baseball box score a few years ago, and one of the umpires was named Fieldin Culbreth. Now, isn’t that an absolutely perfect name for an umpire?
I love the sound of the word. I love the way it rolls around in my mouth when I say it. When I drive through it or past it I can’t help saying “Mahwah”.
It’s been awhile since I saw the movie, but wasn’t this Kathy Bates’ war cry in Fried Green Tomatoes?
When we moved back to Iowa, we considered whether or not to live in Belmond (hubby’s home town), Clarion (my home town), Webster City (where the jobs were), or Eagle Grove. We ended up in Eagle Grove, and the bucolic flavor of the name had a lot to do with it.
If I ever make it back to Washington, I want to live in Puyallup. Pew-AL-up, not pooey-loop.
Back at Georgetown I knew of two people with the surnames Bevilacqua and Acquafredda. Always liked the sound of them, and often thought they should have gotten married and changed their name to Bevilacquafredda so they could have a full sentence in Italian.
Off Former Highway 620 in Ontario there’s a road named Trotter-Oitment Road. Yes, that’s “Oitment” without an N. It sounds like a cream you would out on pigs’ feet, as spoken by someone with a cold. I’m not sure how it got the name; was there a typo in the past that perpetuated itself?
Just to the west, there’s a Vic Tanney Road, which soulds like the kind of formerly-buff man who’d by this point be running a chain of gyms rather than exercising in them.
“And this is my daughter, Cachexia Atelectasis.” She’d be a pretty Mediterranean girl of mixed Roman and Greek ancestry, with that tight curly hair.