[QUOTE=Sampiro]
Georgia has 159 counties. (Texas has about 270 or so, but Georgia’s well under half the population size and under a quarter of the geographic size of Texas; it’s an almost ridiculous number of counties.)
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Well, isn’t the county a more meaningful socio-gummintal entity in the Old South than elsewhere? I remember being in NC and surprised to see big ole colorful signs along the road: “Cucumber County Welcomes You! Zue Keeney, Supervisor”
Iowa, where I’m from, has 99 counties, most of which are just squares drawn in the tallgrass in 1840something with a courthouse, a cophouse, and an eeensy little green sign on the highway, but I knew people growing up who could name every one. Probably because they had numbers, in alpha order, on your car plates. 1-Adair, 2-Adams, 3-Allamakee…97-Woodbury, 98-Worth, 99-Wright.
Texas, OTOH…Texas has enough counties (254) that you can categorize 'em by the kinds of name they have:
-counties with a letter missing (Aransas, Fannin, Kenedy)
-counties named after common household objects (Coke, Jack, Wood)
-counties named for verbs (Dimmit, Falls, Scurry)
-counties that look like typos (Erath, Foard, Parmer)
-counties that just plain sound funny (Deaf Smith, Glasscock, Jim Hogg, Loving, Motley, and Swisher)
-counties that seem to want very badly to be mistaken for other counties (Dallas and Dallam, Gray and Gregg, Walker and Waller, and the trifecta, Hale, Hall and Hill)