Huh, I stand corrected. In that case, Cleveland is unambiguously an entry for this thread, since the origin of the name has nothing to do with the obvious.
great slave lake
named after the Slavey peoples. From what I remember no relation to the word “slave”
Salishan languages are fun. Every word in them is a hell of a tongue twister. By the time white people’s tongues get done untwisting them, they’re nothing like the original words any more.
There’s a town in Idaho named Tensed. Kind of a strange name, don’t you think? They originally wanted to name it Desmet, after Father Pierre de Smet, a missionary. But there already was a De Smet in Idaho (only a mile away, in fact), and the Post Office wouldn’t allow two post offices to have the same name in the same state. The minor spelling differences did not make them sufficiently different. So they reversed the name to Temsed. It was probably inevitable that that name was misspelled by the Post Office.
Just a nitpick, but Pysht is in Washington, on the Olympic Peninsula, near the town of Forks. Now if they would amalgamate the two, we’d have the town of
(wait for it) …
Pysht-Forks.
Dutchess County, New York was named in honor of Mary of Modena, who was the Duchess of York and wife of the future King James II. Spelling was more of an art than a science at the time so Dutchess was considered as good as Duchess.
Nearby Rockland County was named more prosaically. There were apparently a lot of rocks there.
That reminds me of Remlap, AL. A prominent local family was named Palmer. They reversed Palmer and named the town Remlap.
I also wrote a Word Ways article on reversed placenames. here’s a link (pdf). Note that this was published back in 1998, so I didn’t have the luxury of Wikipedia to look info up, so there’s a certain amount of uncertainty in many of the possible reversals I found. One thing I did discover subsequent to the article is that Ynot MT is a variation of the Whynot-type names, not the reversal of Tony.
Could we get clarification on this? The Colorado River doesn’t come anywhere close to Texas.
Different Colorado Rivers. The name means “red” or “colorful”, neither river was named after the other.
As I mentioned upthread, I’m in Moscow, which is just down the highway from Tensed.
We’ve only lived here for nine years, and have often wondered about that name. Now we know, 10-Q veddy much.
There is also “Aransas Pass;” I’m not sure what state that’s in.
I don’t know if they do this in other places, but in my area, there are often themes to street names. There’s a few blocks near each other with women’s names, another area with names of cigarette brands, another with small woodland creatures. The strange thing is, there is another area with a few presidential names, and one of them is Clinton, but it existed before Clinton was president…
The intersection of two Brooklyn streets, one named after a governor and the other (probably) after a local family, gave us the Bush-Clinton Playground.
CONSPIRACY!!!
I searched to see if there are any place names that use “Conspire” or “Conspiracy;” didn’t find any. But I did find a page in which people were saying that when you zoom in on Google Maps, Arabic words briefly appear…OMG, hacking!!!
But it turns, out, no:
Teabagger conspiracy theory fodder: Arabic on a Google Map of Alabama? - googlemaps | Ask MetaFilter
In Las Vegas there’s a section with poetic or spiritual names.
That’s a funny-once, Barbarian.
I always thought that the town of Athol in the Idaho Panhandle was named by someone with a lisp.
Ahem. See Post #85.
Ahem again. See post 87 for the real story.
There’s a new town called East Kilbride in Scotland, just south east of Glasgow. There is really weirdly an area where all the roads are named after places in Canada. I have absolutely no idea why.
Quebec Drive
Montreal Park
Alberta Avenue
Alberta Park
Calgary Park
Vancouver Drive
Ontario Park
Winnipeg Drive
… and so on. I’d love to know why.