Since this terribble disaSTER all I keep hearing the media mention , this parrish that parish.
Why are the areas of New Orleans called Parrishes, is it associated with churches?
Please exlain how the name of parrish came about, since it is not mention in the news media.
Parish = County
According to answers.com, this is a holdover from the time of Spanish rule.
I would have thought the name to be a relic from the French, not Spanish, era, so I found the link provided interesting. Essentially, Louisiana parishes correspond to the administrative units referred to as counties in the other states.
Indeed – the Census Bureau even titles this page “Louisiana County Selection Map”. New Orleans, as can be seen, is in Orleans Parish and surrounded by such parishes as Jefferson, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, and St. Tammany.
Everybody here beat me to it. As far as I can tell there’s no real difference (at least in day-to-day life) between parishes and counties except that some things have different names. County health department = parish health unit. That kinda thing. There’s probably some administrative differences as well but from what I’ve seen in nearly three years in Louisiana it doesn’t matter.
It apparently derives, in the Old World, from the days when the smallest unit of governmental subdivision was the parish (in the churchly sense), with the secular prefet having authority over the same area as attended the local church. Louisiana simply retained the term for the major subdivisions of the state which are in most other states called counties.
I should point out that parishes still exist as subdivisions in much of England, in many cases on the same or similar boundaries to those of medieval times. At least one tax, council tax, is varied accrding to parish. The parish council does have a budget to spend, albeit a small one. And various administration works on the basis of parish boundaries - aspects of my travel expenses for work, for example. However, the big difference is that parishes are a small subdivision within counties, rather than the equivalence between the two terms as used in the US.
This Wikipedia article gives a concise history of how the parish system developed. Most of the parishes do not derive from boundaries used during colonial rule. The parish system was not fully formalized until Louisiana was admitted as a state in 1812.