But not directly with intent to memorialize the Greek, which is the presumed the intent of “naming after”. It’s like saying it’s not wrong to say Scott County, named with intent to commemorate a war general, is actually named for Scotland. Or that King County was named for some Royal figure.
Atlanta was originally Terminus, because it was located at a railway terminus. It changed names over the years, but, as a railway town, a local railroad executive suggested it be called Altantica-Pacifica. That got shortened to Atlanta.
But there’s some speculation as to exactly what a dog is.
I live in Moscow, Idaho, which was named after…
Moscow, Pennsylvania.
The town of Athol, Massachusetts was supposedly named after its first mayor, who reportedly had a lisp.
That’s interesting. I grew up about 20 miles from Arab but I never knew that.
There’s also a Cuba, AL but I don’t know the origin of the name.
In the late sixties and early seventies, the joke in Massachusetts used to be that Endicott Peabody* was the only man to have four cities in Massachusetts named after him – Endicott, Peabody, Marblehead, and Athol.
“Endicott” and “Peabody” are family names with a long history in Massachusetts. “Marblehead” probably derives from the rocky seacoast there. The infamous “Athol” is a surprisingly common town name around the English-speaking world, and seems to derive from the Scottish town of Atholl, where there was an Earl of Atholl in the twelfth century, about whom I’ll bet they made very few jokes.
*Governor from 1963-1965. Shares his unlikely name with a famous Episcopalian priest and educator, founder of the Groton school almost a century earlier. He was grandfather to the governor
This seems to come up once in awhile, but it’s not true.
http://www.novi.org/Special/novis-name.htm
They don’t know where the name came from, but it’s highly unlikely it was from a stagecoach/train/toll road stop.
Zzyzx, California, presumably was inspired by someone who wanted his place to be last in alphabetical order. He did not anticipate that some rival might call a place Zzyzy, so the terminal -x seems to be a logical mystery…
According to the defunct magazine * Quinto Lingo, * people founding a city in Oregon wanted to name it “Psyche.” Nobody knew how to spell it, so they named it Pysht, and that’s the city’s name today.
My city of Englewood, NJ is believed to have named in 1859 because the community had been called the “English Neighborhood”, as the first primarily English-speaking settlement on the New Jersey side of the Hudson River. Not after “Engle’s Woods.”
Not so. The extra letter A was dropped from the city’s name in 1831, with the first issue of the Cleveland Advertiser newspaper. The story goes that the paper made the change so that the name would fit on its masthead.
The Advertiser’s own explanation for the spelling change went: “It was agreeable to the wishes of many of our oldest and most intelligent citizens, who are of the opinion that the ‘a’ is superfluous.”
In 1831, Grover would not be born for six more years yet, and was elected president when the city’s name had already been Cleveland for 53 years.
The Owyhee River in northern Nevada, southern Idaho, and eastern Oregon is named after a few Hawaiians:
The name of the river is from the older spelling of “Hawaii”. It was named for three Hawaiian trappers, in the employ of the North West Company, who were sent to explore the uncharted river. They failed to return to the rendezvous near the Boise River and were never seen again. Due to this the river and its region was named “Owyhee”.
I saw that place name in my atlas when I was 12, and I knew there had to be a connection. Thanks. 
Is that also related to Aloha, Oregon?
My ex was a native of Massachusetts, and told me that Route 202, which runs from Belchertown to Athol, was nicknamed “the Alimentary Canal.”
But if someone had heard the word “Psyche” but didn’t know how it was spelled, wouldn’t they come up with something like “Sighkey”?
“Pysht” sounds more like the physical state they were in while tossing around potential names (assuming they were convening in a local tavern).
Kuching is the capital city of the state of Sarawak in Malaysia. In the Malay language, it means ‘cat’.
Following up on the unlink in your link, which attributes the name to:
…ultimately one comes to:
Goodness gracious. No rest for ye olde linguistic scholars, eh?