Regina, the capital of Saskatchewan, Canada, was a popular Cree Indian buffalo hunt location, marked by a massive pile of buffalo bones, and the original name of the settlement was Pile-of-Bones, a translation of the Cree name. It was renamed Regina in honour of Queen Victoria after being selected as the site of the territorial capital.
that I found in a history of New York City – the Flatbush section of Brooklyn does not get its name from bushes that are flat. It’s a corruption of 't vlack bos, meaning “a wooded plain”.
Wikipedia renders this differently, without the idiosyncratic 't:
There are a few towns hereabouts that appear to be named after husband-and-wife settlers. “Floydada” after Floyd and Ada, “Idalou” after Ida and Lou…
My town is named after a journalist, Fanny Wood, who probably didn’t exist. The fact that she doesn’t exist doesn’t stop us from having a town fair every year named after her.
The legend of Fanny Wood: Union County town isn’t quite sure where its name came from
I used to work out there at various car dealerships. Sometimes I wouldn’t get a chance to go to Intercourse but I would end up in Blue Ball or Bird in Hand.
An area of Sheffield, South Yorkshire, was known as Mount Pisgah, and there is still a road of that name. Mount Pisgah was the height from which Moses looked down at what would become the Holy Land and Sheffield’s Mount Pisgah looked down upon land owned by a family called Holy.
Well, both the English words are cognates (ultimately) of the Dutch ones, so it’s not too farfetched a “translation.” It would be like saying “Bloomfield” for some place originally called the German “Blaumenfeld,” even though the German word really means “field of flowers.” There’s been some semantic shift since the common ancestor of the words, but not enough to make an “eye translation” completely implausible.
Misleading comparison – it’s hard to miss the similarity of “Bloomfield” and “Blaumerfeld”, but it’s pushing it to say “bos” is the same as “bushj”, when it means “woods” or “fgrest”. Yeah, you can see where the similarity lies, but it ain’t like saying “field” is “feld”
Joliet, IL was named for French-Canadian explorer Louis Jolliet. That’s not unusual or weird.
Neighboring community Romeoville, on the other hand, was named as such because it made for a good pun with neighboring Joliet :smack:
Remlap, AL
There’s a small town in northern Queensland (Aus) called 1770, in commemoration of a landing there by Captain James Cook in…wait for it, you’ll never guess…1770!
Though technically the town name is spelled out (as in Seventeen Seventy), on most maps, directories and through local lore, it’s 1770.
I hear you, but my mileage varies. Maybe because I’ve been interested in etymologies for a long time, I see the “bush/bos” connection as likely (though not definitive, before looking it up). I can see why I’d be in the minority on this, so your point is well taken.
I respect that, but for me this falls into the “it’s obvious when you already know the answer” category. Most people, presented with “Flatbush” and “'t vlacke bos” and its translation as “wooded plain”, would not say they were the same. I’m not saying they aren’t related, but the equivalence isn’t there, and is certainly not obvious.
There’s the “Alphabet Line” of towns in the Canadian Prairie provinces. The Grand Trunk Pacific established stations at a regular basis, and gave them names in alphabetical order, starting from the east and going west. They repeated the alphabet roughly three times crossing what is now Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
The towns that grew up at the railway stations normally took the same name.
I remember a P.J. O’Rourke thing where he defined the Mississippi as the border between sensible and weird names. I’m not American, so I might be in the dark here a bit, but from what little I know, it seems to follow. East of the river, you get classical names like Athens, GA, and west of it, I think the example he used was something like “Where Did I Leave My Hat, AZ”.
Was he on the money?
Heh, I see Q only got 2 stations, and X only got one.
Little Rock, Arkansas, is named after the unusually small rock that is a local landmark. :D:p
(But seriously, why? If it was called Big Rock, it would make some sense.)
Until 1845 Joliet was spelled “Juliet.”
Or so says wikipedia.
In the US, there’s 84, Pennsylvania, which gave its name to a chain of lumberyards. And 96, South Carolina, home of baseball pitcher Bill Voiselle, the only major leaguer to wear the name of his hometown on his jersey. Both were named for railroad mile markers.
Novi, Michigan, home of a Ford engine plant, grew up around a railroad water tower, the sixth in a line of them, duly marked with Roman numerals as “No. VI”.
I’ve often wondered about the name of my hometown, Lore City, Ohio. (Pop. 325 in 2012)
It was originally named Campbell’s Station. After Morgan’s Raiders came through and wreaked their worst havoc ever on the little village, this ensued:
“There happened to be two Campbell’s Stations at that time and the larger one kept the name. When deciding what to rename the smaller town, the Irish Catholics had a big hand in it. Their church were attempting to educate the people in this small community; therefore devised the new name as The City of Learning or Lore City… lore meaning knowledge or learning.”
Kind of hilarious if you’ve ever lived in those parts, but I’m glad to know. I’d never found anything about it until I looked it up for this thread.