nm
Thanks. I had been misinformed.
Who in turn took his title from the town of Sandwich, in Kent. It was a port (used to be; it’s long since silted up) and when Edward Montagu, an English admiral, was raised to the peerage in 1660 he thought it would be a nice title to pick. He had no other connection with the place.
It isn’t renamed if the name is the same. You could describe it as a (convenient) rebranding of the county’s name.
Strangely, there were stories about an island called Brasil or Hy-Brasil in the Atlantic to the west of Ireland long before the country was discovered, but the derivation is from Gaelic and the similarity is coincidental.
The Nullarbor plain is a huge desert in Southern/Central Australia. Many people believe Nullarbor is an Aboriginal word, because it has a similar sound and rhythm to many other indigenous placenames. In fact, it was named by an Australian Surveying team and is simple Latin in origin: Null-Arbor = No-Trees
Speaking of Ohio, there’s Miami University…
Don’t forget Miami, Arizona.
Some time back I made a list of such towns, i.e. those with the same name as another state. I managed to find some 340 such places, although a number of them no longer exist or have since changed their name. I wrote up my findings in an article for Word Ways magazine. But instead of tediously listing all of them, I constructed a chain like so:
[ul]
[li] place A is in state B[/li][li] place B is in state C[/li][li] place C is in state D [/li][li] etc.[/li][/ul]
I managed to construct a chain of 41 links connecting 42 states. You can find the article here (pdf)
Note that this was published back in 1999 and the email address give at the end is no longer valid. And while I still have the the raw data file, it’s on a computer I can’t get info off of due to technological obsolescence. Well I can bring it up on a monitor and copy it manually, but that’s about it.
The city of Electra, Texas, was not named for the personage from Greek Mythology (who gave us the word “electricity”), but for Electra Waggoner, the wife if the rancher who developed the town. Which become even more interesting later on. Her neice, Electra Waggoner Biggs, a well-known sculptress in Texas, was married to a General Motors executive who named the Buick Electra after her in 1959…
Novi, MI has a similar story. It began as a stagecoach stop on the route between Detroit and Lansing. It was station #6, and was identified on maps as “No. VI”.
Also from Texas: Beaumont. French for “beautiful mountain.” Located squarely in the Gulf Coastal Plain, the regional topopgraphy is almost flat. (The place is ugly, too, for that matter.) Apparently at some point city officials decided to find something more appealing than its then-current name of Gladysville.
The state of Wyoming is named for the Wyoming Valley, the region of Pennsylvania where the cities of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton are located.
Dildo, Newfoundland, a fishing outport of several hundred people, is named after a part of a small boat, shaped like a round-topped cylindrical post on the gunwale, around which to secure a rope. The nautical word goes back to the early days of the Newfoundland fishery (1600s) and probably back to Ireland or England before that. The same word was put into later use with expanded meanings, etymologically related to the resemblance of the part to the human anatomy. Which was no doubt thought ribald even by the fishermen, and probably used at least once for its more modern application before they were mass-produced for detached non-maritime consumption.
Well,Wye Knott?
“Arrr, be quick and grab me dildo, there, boy!”
I’ve lived in King County WA on and off for most of my life. It was named after an early vice president, William Rufus King.
However, it was fairly quietly changed to be named for M.L.K. a few years ago.
No, she didn’t. The word “electricity” derives from the Greek word for amber, ēlektron (ἤλεκτρον), because it was known to the Greeks that rubbing a piece of amber with woolen or other material produces sparks of static electricity, and causes the amber to attract bits of chaff. Amber’s electrical properties are believed to have been investigated by Thales, the first of the Greek philosophers (and, in many respects, the first scientist), in around 580B.C.
That is as maybe, but I daresay Mrs Waggoner (and, indeed, Mrs Biggs) was ultimately named after the character from Greek myth (and each was doubtless well aware of the fact), so it is not really wrong to say that the town (and the car) is named after the mythological character.
Olympia, WA is named not for the city in Greece, but for Mt. Olympus. Not the Mt. Olympus in Greece, though, but the one located in the Olympic mountains to the west of the city, which got that name from a British navigator in the 18th century. (It had previously been named “Smithfield”.)
See posts 4 et. seq. 
King was also very likely Buchanan’s longtime lover, and probably the source of his extreme pro-slavery stance.