I recently discovered the origin of the name Agloe, a locality in New York. It’s unusual, to say the least.
This name began as a copyright trap. That is, a bogus town added to an obscure corner of a map. If someone copies the map, they’ll also copy the bogus town and then the owners of the copyright can say “Gotcha!”. To coin the name, the cartographers took their initials and anagrammed them.
Well, the joke was on them. When they found that Rand McNally had added the place to their maps, they did the “Gotcha!” bit, only to find that RMcN hadn’t copied their map. Instead, someone in that area had built a general store there and named it after the ‘paper town’ they found on an Esso road map. So the county added it to their list of communities and Rand got it from them.
So why should I be agloe about this name? As some of you may remember, I’ve compiled Wiki-lists of places named from acronyms and places named from anagrams. So this would seem to belong to both lists at once. OK, it’s an anagram, so it goes there. But it doesn’t completely fit in with the list of initialisms from personal names. Pretty much all of those are initials of the founders or early settlers, rather than mapmakers. Well, I’ll add it anyway, but somehow it just feels a bit wrong.
BTW, there’s very few known examples of such paper towns. Besides this one, there’s a only two or three others known. But that’s to be expected; those who put them there don’t want to advertise their existence. They’ll only come out if they become evidence in a court case.