The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

13. Names

The English, it has always seemed to me, have a certain genius for names. A glance through the British edition of Who’s Who throws up a roll call that sounds disarmingly like the characters in a P. G. Wodehouse novel: Lord Fraser of Tullybelton, Captain Allwyne Arthur Compton Farquaharson of Invercauld, Professor Valentine Mayneord, Sir Helenus Milmo, Lord Keith of Kinkel. Many British appellations are of truly heroic proportions, like that of the World War I admiral named Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfulry Plunkett-Ernel-Erle-Drax. The best ones go in for a kind of gloriously silly redundancy toward the end, as with Sir Humphrey Dodington Benedict Sherston Sherston-Baker and the truly unbeatable Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraduati Tollemache-Tollemache-de Orellana-Plantagenet-Tollemache-Tollemache, a British army major who died in World War I. The leading explorer in Britain today is Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes. Somewhere in Britain to this day there is an old family rejoicing in the name MacGillesheatheanaich. In the realms of nomenclature clearly we are dealing here with giants.

Often, presumably for reasons of private amusement, the British pronounce their names in ways that bear almost no resemblance to their spelling. Leveson-Gower is “looson gore,” Marjoribanks is “marchbanks,” Hiscox is “hizzko,” Howick is “hoyk,” Ruthven is “rivven,” Zuill is “yull,” Menzies is “mingiss.” They find particular pleasure in taking old Norman names and mashing them around until they become something altogether unique, so that Beaulieu becomes “bewley,” Beauchamp turns into “beecham,” Prideaux into “pridducks,” Devereux to “devrooks,” Cambois to “cammiss,” Hautbois to “hobbiss,” Belvoir somehow becomes “beaver,” and Beaudesert turns, unfathomably, into “belzer.”

They can perform this trick with even the simplest names, turning Sinclair into “sinkler,” Blackley into “blakely,” Blount into “blunt,” Bethune into “beeton,” Cockburn into “coburn,” Coke into “cook.” Lord Home becomes “lord hume,” the novelist Anthony Powell becomes “pole,” P. G. Wodehouse becomes “woodhouse,” the poet William Cowper becomes “cooper.” Caius College, Cambridge, is “keys,” while Magdalen College, Oxford, and Magdalene College, Cambridge, are both pronounced “mawdlin.”

I could go on and on. In fact, I think I will. Viscount Althorp pronounces his name “awltrop,” while the rather more sensible people of Althorp, the Northamptonshire village next to the viscount’s ancestral home, say “all-thorp.” The Scottish town of Auchinleck is pronounced “ock-in-leck,” but the local baron, Lord Boswell of Auchinleck, pronounces it “affleck.” There are two Barons Dalziel. One pronounces it “dalzeel,” the other “dee-ell.” The family name Ridealgh can be pronounced “ridalj” or “riddi-alsh.” Some members of the Pepys family pronounce it “peeps” as the great diarist Samuel Pepys did, but others say “peppiss” and still others say “pips.” The family name Hesmondhalgh can be “hezmondhaw,” “hezmondhalsh,” or “hezmondhawltch.” The surname generally said to have the most pronunciations is Featherstonehaugh, which can be pronounced in any of five ways: “feather-stun-haw,” “feerston-shaw,” “feston-haw,” “feeson-hay,” or (for those in a hurry) “fan-shaw.” But in fact there are two other names with five pronunciations: Coughtrey, which can be “kōtry,” “kawtry,” “kowtry,” “kootry,” and “kofftry,” and Wriotheseley, which can be “rottsly,” “rittsly,” “rizzli,” “rithly,” or “wriotheslee.”

The problem is so extensive, and the possibility of gaffes so omnipresent, that the BBC employs an entire pronunciation unit, a small group of dedicated orthoepists (professional pronouncers) who spend their working lives getting to grips with these illogical pronunciations so that broadcasters don’t have to do it on the air.

In short, there is scarcely an area of name giving in which the British don’t show a kind of wayward genius. Take street names. Just in the City of London, an area of one square mile, you can find Pope’s Head Alley, Mincing Lane, Garlick Hill, Crutched Friars, Threadneedle Street, Bleeding Heart Yard, Seething Lane. In the same compact area you can find churches named St. Giles Cripplegate, St. Sepulchre Without Newgate, All Hallows Barking, and the practically unbeatable St. Andrews-by-the-Wardrobe. But those are just their everyday names: Oftentimes the full, official titles are even more breathtaking, as with The Lord Mayor’s Parish Church of St. Stephen Walbrook and St. Swithin Londonstone, St. Benet Sheerhogg and St. Mary Bothall with St. Laurence Pountney, which is, for all that, just one church.

Equally arresting are British pub names. Other people are content to dub their drinking establishment with pedestrian names like Harry’s Bar and the Greenwood Lounge. But a Briton, when he wants to sup ale, must find his way to the Dog and Duck, the Goose and Firkin, the Flying Spoon, or the Spotted Dog. The names of Britain’s 70,000 or so pubs cover a broad range, running from the inspired to the improbable, from the deft to the daft. Almost any name will do so long as it is at least faintly absurd, unconnected with the name of the owner, and entirely lacking in any suggestion of drinking, conversing, and enjoying oneself. At a minimum the name should puzzle foreigners—this is a basic requirement of most British institutions—and ideally it should excite long and inconclusive debate, defy all logical explanation, and evoke images that border on the surreal. Among the pubs that meet, and indeed exceed, these exacting standards are the Frog and Nightgown, the Bull and Spectacles, the Flying Monk, and the Crab and Gumboil.

However unlikely a pub’s name may sound, there is usually some explanation rooted in the depths of history. British inns were first given names in Roman times, 2,000 years ago, but the present quirky system dates mostly from the Middle Ages, when it was deemed necessary to provide travelers, most of them illiterate, with some sort of instantly recognizable symbol.

The simplest approach, and often the most prudent, was to adopt a royal or aristocratic coat of arms. Thus a pub called the White Hart indicates ancient loyalty to Richard II (whose decree it was, incidentally, that all inns should carry signs), while an Eagle and Child denotes allegiance to the Earls of Derby and a Royal Oak commemorates Charles II, who was forced to hide in an oak tree after being defeated by Cromwell during the English Civil War. (If you look carefully at the pub sign, you can usually see the monarch hiding somewhere in the branches.) The one obvious shortcoming of such a system was that names had to be hastily changed every time a monarch was toppled. Occasionally luck would favor the publicans, as when Richard III (symbolized by a white boar) was succeeded by the Earl of Oxford (blue boar) and amends could be simply effected with a pot of paint. But pubkeepers quickly realized that a more cost-effective approach was to stick to generic names, which explains why there are so many pubs called the Queen’s Head (about 300), King’s Head (400), and Crown (the national champion at more than 1,000).

Many pubs owe their names to popular sports (the Cricketers, the Fox and Hounds, the Cockpit), or to the workaday pursuits of the people who once drank in them. Pubs like the Plough, the Fleece, the Woolpack, and the Shepherd’s Rest were clearly designed for farmers and farmworkers. The Boot was for cobblers, the Anchor for sailors, and the Shoulder of Mutton for butchers. Not all references are so immediately evident. The Beetle and Wedge in Berkshire sounds hopelessly obscure until you realize that a beetle and wedge were basic tools of carpenters 200 years ago.

Many of the very oldest pub names represent religious themes—the Crossed Keys, the Seven Stars, the Hope and Anchor. The Lamb and Flag, a fairly common name in Britain still, was the symbol of the Knights Templar, who rode to the Crusades, and the Saracen’s Head and Turk’s Head commemorate their enemies’ fate. Still other pub names are built around catchphrases, homilies, puns, and bits of philosophy, or are simply of unknown provenance. Names such as the Tumbledown Dick, First and Last, Mortal Man, Romping Donkey, Ram Jam Inn, Live and Let Live, and Man with a Load of Mischief (the sign outside depicts a man with a woman slung over his shoulder) all fall resoundingly into this category.

The picture is further clouded by the consideration that many pub names have been corrupted over the centuries. The Pig and Whistle is said to have its roots in peg (a drinking vessel) and wassail (a festive drink). The Goat and Compasses is sometimes said to come from “God Encompasseth Us.” The Elephant and Castle, originally a pub and now a district of London, may have been the Infanta de Castille. The Old Bull and Bush, a famous pub on Hampstead Heath, is said to come from Boulogne Bouche and to commemorate a battle in France. Some of these derivations may be fanciful, but there is solid evidence to show that the Dog and Bacon was once the Dorking Beacon, that the Cat and Fiddle was once Caterine la Fidèle (at least it is recorded as such in the Domesday Book), and that the Ostrich Inn in Buckinghamshire began life as the Hospice Inn.

All this is by way of introducing, in a decidedly roundabout manner, how we came to acquire our own names. The study of names is onomastics. For much of history, surnames, or last names, were not considered necessary. Two people named, say, Peter living in the same hamlet might adopt or be given second names to help distinguish them from each other—so that one might be called Peter White-Head and the other Peter Son of John (or Johnson)—but these additional names were seldom passed on. The business of acquiring surnames was a long one that evolved over centuries rather than years. As might be expected, it began at the top of the social scale and worked its way down. In England last names did not become usual until after the Norman conquest, and in many other European countries, such as Holland, they evolved much later still. Most surnames come ultimately, if not always obviously, from one of four sources: place-names (e.g., Lincoln, Worthington), nicknames (Whitehead, Armstrong), trade names (Smith, Carpenter), and patronymics, that is names indicating a familial relationship (Johnson, Robertson). In his lifetime a person might be known by a variety of names—for instance, as Peter the Butcher Who Lives by the Well at Putney Green or some such. This would eventually transmute into Peter Butcher or Peter Green or Peter Wells. Often in such cases the person would take his name from the figure on a nearby inn sign. In the Middle Ages, when the ability to read could scarcely be assumed, it was common for certain types of businesses to have symbols outside their doors. The striped barber pole is a holdover from those days. A wine merchant would always have a bush by his front door. Hence his neighbor might end up being called George Bush.

Two events gave a boost to the adoption of surnames in England. The first was the introduction of a poll tax in 1379, which led the government to collect the name of every person in the country aged sixteen or over, and the second was the enactment of the Statute of Additions in 1413, which required that all legal documents contain not just the person’s given name, but also his or her occupation and place of abode. These two pieces of medieval bureaucracy meant that virtually everyone had to settle on a definite and fixed surname.

It’s surprising how many medieval occupations are embedded in modern family names. Some are obvious: Bowman, Archer, Carpenter, Shepherd, Forrester. But many others are not, either because the craft has died or become rare, as with Fuller (a cleanser of cloths) and Fletcher (a maker of bows and arrows) or because the spelling has been corrupted in some way, as with Bateman (a corrupted form of boatman) or because the name uses a regionalism, as with Akerman (a provincial word for a plowman). It mustn’t be forgotten that this was a time of great flux in the English language, when many regional spellings and words were competing for dominance. Thus such names as Hill, Hall, and Hull could all originally have meant Hill but come from different parts of the country. Smith is the most common name in America and Britain, but it is also one of the most common in nearly every other European language. The German Schmidt, the French Ferrier, Italian Ferraro, Spanish Herrero, Hungarian Kovacs, and Russian Kusnetzov are all Smiths.

English names based on places almost always had prepositions to begin with but these gradually disappeared, so that John of Preston became just John Preston, though occasionally they survive in names like Atwater and Underwood or as remnants in names like Noakes (a contraction of atten Oakes, or “by the oak trees”) or Nash (for atten Ash, “by the ash tree”). A curious fact about names based on places is that they are so often obscure—mostly from places that few people have heard of. Why should there be so many more Middletons than Londons, so many more Worthingtons than Bristols? The main cities of medieval Britain—London, York, Norwich, Glasgow—are relatively uncommon as surnames even though many thousands of people lived there. To understand this seeming paradox you must remember that the purpose of surnames is to distinguish one person or family from the great mass of people. If a person called himself Peter of London, he would be just one of hundreds of such Peters and anyone searching for him would be at a loss. So as a rule a person would become known as Peter of London only if he moved to a rural location, where London would be a clear identifying feature, but that did not happen often. In the same way, those people named Farmer probably owe their name to the fact that an ancestor left the farm, while names like French, Fleming, Welch, or Walsh (both from Welsh) indicate that the originator was not a resident of those places but rather an emigrant.

Another superficially puzzling thing is why many people have ecclesiastical names like Bishop, Monk, Priest, and Prior when such figures were presumably celibate and unable to pass on their names. The reason here is that part of the original name has probably been lost. The full name may once have been the “Bishop’s man” if he was a servant or “Priest’s Hill” if that was where he lived.

The origins of other names are not immediately apparent because they come from non-English sources. Russell was from the medieval French roussell, “red-haired,” while Morgan is Welsh for white-haired. Sometimes strange literal meanings are hidden in innocuous-sounding names. Kennedy, means “ugly head” in Gaelic, Boyd means “yellow-faced or sickly,” Campbell means “crooked mouth.” The same is equally true of other languages. As Mario Pei notes, Gorky means “bitter,” Tolstoy means “fat,” and Machiavelli means “bad nails.” Cicero is Roman slang for a wart on the nose (it means literally “chickpea”).

In America, the situation with surnames is obviously complicated by the much greater diversity of backgrounds of the people. Even so, 183 of the 200 most common last names in America are British. However, a few names that are common in America are noticeably less common in Britain. Johnson is the second most common name in the United States (after Smith), but comes much further down the list in Britain. The reason for this is of course the great influx of Swedes to America in the nineteenth century—though in fact Johnson is not a native Swedish name. It is an Americanizing of the Swedish Jonsson or Johansson. Another name much more often encountered in America than Britain is Miller. In Britain, millers were unpopular throughout much of history because of their supposed tendency to cheat the farmers who brought them grain. So it was not a flattering name. A modern equivalent might be the name Landlord. Most Millers in America were in fact originally Muellers or Müllers. The German word had the same meaning but did not carry the same derisory connotations.

Many, perhaps most, immigrants to America modified their names in some way to accommodate American spellings and phonics. Often, with difficult Polish or Russian names, this was involuntary; immigrants simply had new names given to them at their port of entry. But more often the people willingly made changes to blend into their adopted country more smoothly and to avoid the constant headache of having to spell their name to everyone. Far easier to change Pfoersching to Pershing, Wistinghausen to Westinghouse, Pappadimitracoupolos to Pappas, Niewhuis to Newhouse, Kuiper to Cooper, Schumacher to Shoemaker, Krankheit to Cronkite, Sjögren to Seagren, Lindqvist to Lindquist, and so on. It wasn’t just difficult Slavic and Germanic names that this happened with. Scots named McLeod generally changed the spelling of their name to make it conform with its pronunciation, McCloud, and those named McKay usually gave up telling people that it rhymed with sky (as it still does in Britain).

Sometimes people took the opportunity to get rid of undesirable surnames which had been imposed on their ancestors during periods of subjugation. Often these were offensive—either because the giver had a wayward sense of humor or because he hoped to be bribed into making it something less embarrassing. For instance, the Greek name Kolokotronis translates as “bullet in the ass.” But others kept their names—for instance, the Goldwaters, even though that name was long a synonym for urine.

Another change names sometimes underwent in America was to have the stress altered. For some reason, in American speech there is a decided preference to stress the last or next to last syllable in a person’s name. Thus Italians coming to America who called themselves “Es-PO-si-to” had the name changed to “Es-po-SI-to.” Again, this happened with British names as well. Purcell, Bernard, and Barnett, which are pronounced in Britain as “persul,” “bernurd,” and “barnutt,” became in America “pur-SELL,” “ber-NARD,” and “bar-NETT.” But this process wasn’t extended to all names: Mitchell and Barnum, for instance, were left with the stress on the first syllable.

Over time most names have been variously battered and knocked about. We have already seen how the name Waddington was variously rendered as Wadigton, Wuldingdoune, Windidune, and so on. Shakespeare’s grandfather usually called himself Shakestaff.[8] Snooks might have started life as Sevenoaks, the name of a town in Kent. Backus might have been Bakehouse. James K. Polk, the eleventh U.S. president, was descended from people named Pollock. Few names haven’t been changed at some time or other in their history. This is often most vividly demonstrated in place-names.

Cambridge, for instance, was called Grantanbrycge in the tenth century. But the conquering Normans found that a mouthful—they particularly had trouble with gr combinations—and began to spell it Canterbrigie. Then it became successively Caumbrigge. Cambrugge, and Caunbrige before finally arriving at its modern spelling. Centuries from now it may be something else again. By a similarly convoluted process Eboracum eventually metamorphosed into York.

These verbal transformations can be remarkably convoluted. Brightlingsea, according to P. H. Reaney’s The Origin of English Place Names, has been spelled 404 ways since the first interloper began to tinker with the Celtic Brictrich. Moreover, because of varying influences a single root may have evolved into a variety of words—Brighton, Brixton, Brislington, and Bricklehampton, improbable as it seems, all began life with the same name: Beorhthelmes.

The successive waves of invading Celts, Romans, Danes, Vikings, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Normans all endlessly shaped and reshaped British place-names. The result is that England possesses some of the most resplendent place-names in the world—names that roll around on the tongue and fill the mouth like fine claret: Wendens Ambo, Saffron Walden, Gussage All Saints, Stocking Pelham, Farleigh Wallop, Dunton Bassett, Husbands Bosworth. There are 30,000 place-names in Britain and at least half of them are arresting and distinctive—far more than can be accounted for by random activity. They are as integral a part of the glory of the British countryside as thatched cottages, wandering hedgerows, and meadows full of waving buttercups and darting butterflies. As with family names, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that the British have such distinctive place-names not because they just accidentally evolved, but rather because the British secretly like living in places with names like Lower Slaughter and Great Snoring.

Certainly their spellings and pronunciations are often as unfathomable as those of family names. Occasionally the spellings seem to defy pronunciation—as with Meopham, a town in Kent pronounced “meppam,” or Auchtermuchty, a Scottish town pronounced “awk-ter-muck-tee”—but more often it is the other way around: The spellings look simple and straightforward, so that the innocent traveler is lulled into a sense of security, little realizing what treacheries they hide, so that Postwick is “pozzick,” Puncknowle is “punnel,” Keighley is “keethley,” Holnicote is “hunney-cut.” Cholmondeston is “chumson,” Wyardisbury is “razebry,” Wymondham is “windhum,” Flawith is “floyth.” Dent-de-Lion, a town in Kent, is pronounced “dandelion”—thus combining the old spelling and modern pronunciation of that pernicious weed.

Sometimes syllables are dropped out or blithely ignored, so that Browsholme is pronounced “brewsum,” Wavertree becomes “wawtree,” Ludgvan is “ludge-un,” Darlingscott is “darskut,” and Culzean Castle is “cullayne.” Lots of names have two or more pronunciations. Harewood in West Yorkshire has two pronunciations: “harwood” for the stately home and “harewood” for the village that surrounds it. Hednesford, Staffordshire, can be pronounced either “hedjford” or “henssford.” Shrewsbury can be “shrooz-bree” or “shroze-bree.” Athelstaneford in Scotland can be pronounced as spelled or as “elshanford.” And at least one place has two spellings and two pronunciations—Frithsden/Friesden, Hertfordshire, which can be pronounced “frizdun” or “freezdun.”

England has three villages called Houghton and each has a different pronunciation—respectively “hoton,” “hawton,” and “howton.” Oughtibridge, South Yorkshire, has four: “owtibrij,” “awtibrij,” “ootibrij,” and “ōtibrij.” Dittisham, Devon, has three pronunciations: “dittisham,” “dittisum,” “dittsum.” Adwalton, West Yorkshire, is sometimes pronounced “Atherton” because the town was formerly called Heather Town. But perhaps the strangest of all is Okeford Fitzpaine, Dorset, which many locals pronounce—for reasons no one can begin to guess at—“fippeny ockford.”

Sadly, it appears that names are more and more being pronounced as spelled—perhaps a consequence of increased mobility among the British. Pontefract, in West Yorkshire, was once pronounced “pumfrit,” but now it is always pronounced as spelled. The same fate has befallen Cirencester, which once was “sissiter” but now is usually just “siren-sester.” Grantham and Walthamstow are both pronounced with “th” sounds even though etymologically they were Grant-ham and Walt-hamstow, in which ways they were once pronounced. Curiously this does not hold true for the obscure town in Nottinghamshire called Gotham, from which New York City takes its nickname; the locals pronounce it “Gott-hum.”

And all of this isn’t even to begin to mention Wales where you can find towns and villages with names that look like Scrabble leftovers, among them Bwlchtocyn, Llwynddyrys, Cwmtwrch, Mwnt, Pwllheli, which are pronounced respectively—oh, to hell with it.

In America, obviously, there has been less time to knock the names around, but even so it has sometimes happened, usually as a result of making foreign names more palatable—changing the Ojibway Missikamaa into Michigan or the Dakota Indian šhíyena into Cheyenne. But occasionally it has happened for no real reason, rather in the English manner, as when Ricksburg, Idaho (named for one Thomas Ricks), transmogrified into Rexburg.

Nor has America had the time to come up with unpronounceable names, though there are a few around—notably Schohomogomoc Hill, New Hampshire (Algonquian for “place with fire markings near”), Natchitoches, Louisiana (pronounced “nak-uh-tosh”), and Schaghticoke, New York (pronounced “skat-uh-kohk”). However, there are many names that most Americans think they know how to pronounce that are actually pronounced differently by the locals. If you get fifteen of the following twenty names right you can consider yourself a leading authority:

Boise, Idaho

Boyce-ee

Gettysburg, Pennsylvania

Gettizburg

Pierre, South Dakota

Peer

Quincy, Massachusetts

Quinzy

Monticello, Virginia

Montisello

Lancaster, Pennsylvania

Lankus-ter

Biloxi, Mississippi

Buh-lux-ee

Yakima, Washington

Yak-im-uh

St. Ignace, Michigan

Saint Ig-nuss

Concord, Massachusetts and New Hampshire

Conk-urd (or Conkit)

Arkansas River

Ar-kan-zus

Gloucester, Massachusetts

Gloss-ter

Milan, Michigan

Mile-un

Lima, Ohio

Lye-muh

Nevada, Iowa

Nuh-vay-da

Versailles, Tennessee

Vur-sales

Vienna, Georgia

Vye-enna

Houston, Ohio

How-stun

Montevideo, Minnesota

Monna-video

Cairo, Illinois

Kay-ro

Often Americans of earlier generations found it easier to change the spellings of names rather than the pronunciations of outsiders. Thus Worcester, Ohio, became Wooster and Hertford, Connecticut, became Hartford. Many French names were quite naturally Americanized—as with Notre Dame, Detroit, Des Plaines, and St. Louis. Dutch names were equally problematic. Sometimes they required only a minor spelling adjustment, converting Haarlem to Harlem and Cape Mey to Cape May, but often they had to be pulled about like taffy until they became something altogether more palatable, so that De Kromme Zee became Gramercy and Vlacht Bos (“level forest”) became Flatbush. In Florida, by a similar process, the Spanish Cayo Hueso (“bone island”) became Key West.

However, what America does possess in abundance is a legacy of colorful names. A mere sampling: Chocolate Bayou, Dime Box, Ding Dong, and Lick Skillet, Texas; Sweet Gum Head, Louisiana; Whynot, Mississippi; Zzyzx Springs, California; Coldass Creek, Stiffknee Knob, and Rabbit Shuffle, North Carolina; Scratch Ankle, Alabama; Fertile, Minnesota; Climax, Michigan; Intercourse, Pennsylvania; Breakabeen, New York; What Cheer, Iowa; Bear Wallow, Mud Lick, Minnie Mousie, Eighty-Eight, and Bug, Kentucky; Dull, Only, Peeled Chestnut, Defeated, and Nameless, Tennessee; Cozy Corners, Wisconsin; Humptulips, Washington; Hog Heaven, Idaho; Ninety-Six, South Carolina; Potato Neck, Maryland; Why, Arizona; Dead Bastard Peak, Crazy Woman Creek, and the unsurpassable Maggie’s Nipples, Wyoming.

Many of these names, alas, have been changed, but quite a few still exist, and some places make a living out of their curious cognomens, most notably Intercourse, Pennsylvania, which does a brisk trade in double entendre postcards. Others draw crowds only occasionally, as with Eighty-Eight, Kentucky, on which attention naturally focused during 1988. One couple came all the way from Casper, Wyoming, to be married on the eighth day of the eighth month of 1988 at 8:08 P.M. in Eighty-Eight. The story goes that the town got its unusual name when the founder, one Dabnie Nunnally, reached in his pocket and found he had eighty-eight cents there. In 1948, for what it’s worth, eighty-eight people from Eighty-Eight voted for Truman and eighty-eight voted for Dewey.

It doesn’t take a whole lot, it would appear, to persuade people to change their town names. In 1950, in response to a challenge from a popular radio show, the people of Hot Springs, New Mexico, voted by four to one to rename their town Truth or Consequences. Their prize was that Ralph Edwards, the host, broadcast his tenth anniversary show from there. The thrill of that occasion was presumably short-lived, but the name has stuck. Four years later, the widow of the athlete Jim Thorpe agreed to have her husband buried in the mountain resort of Mauch Chunk, Pennsylvania, if the people there would rename the town after her husband, and they did. Cody, Wyoming, did the same thing for Buffalo Bill Cody.

In addition to giving places colorful names, the early settlers tended to give their states colorful—if not always terribly flattering—nicknames. Nebraska was once called the Bugeating State and Missouri was the Puke State. Sometimes these nicknames have stuck but nobody is quite sure why. Everybody knows that Indiana is the Hoosier State, but nobody now seems to know what a Hoosier is or ever was. Similarly nobody seems too sure of why Iowa calls itself the Hawkeye State.

Often the names we know places by are nothing like the names the locals use. In Italian, it’s not Florence but Firenze, not Naples but Napoli, not Padua but Padova, not Venice but Venezia, not Milan but Milano, not Genoa but Genova. To the Danes it’s not Copenhagen but København (pronounced “koopen-howen”). To the Yugoslavians it’s not Belgrade but Beograd. To the Russians it’s not Moscow but Moskva. And to the Dutch it’s not The Hague but Den Haag. The names of countries are even more at variance with their English versions. Try covering up the left-hand column below and seeing how many you can guess.

Greece

Ellinki Dimokratia

Finland

Suomen Tasavalta

Hungary

Magyar Népköztáraság

Albania

Shqipëri

Japan

Nihon

Greenland

Kalâtdlit Nunât

Jordan

Al Mamlaka al Urduniya al Hashemiyah

South Korea

Han Kook

North Korea

Chosun Minchu-chui Immin Kongwha-guk

Morocco

Al-Mamlaka al-Maghrebia

China

Zhonghua Renmin Gonghe Guo

Sweden

Konungariket Sverige

Tonga

Friendly Islands

There are a variety of reasons for this. Sometimes the names we use are simply imposed by outsiders with scant regard for local nomenclature. Korea, for instance, is a Japanese name, not a Korean one. Hungary is a Latin name adapted from Old Russian and thus has nothing to do with the name used by the Hungarians themselves. Bosporus, the name for the strait linking Europe to Asia, is simply the Greek translation of Oxford. The local Turks call it Karadeniz Bogazi.

Often place-names arise from mishearings or misunderstandings—notably the West Indies, which of course have nothing to do with India. They simply reflect Columbus’s startling inability to determine which hemisphere he was in. Yucatán in Mexico means “What?” or “What are you saying?”—the reply given by the natives to the first Spanish conquistadors to fetch up on their shores. The term Dutch is similarly based on a total misapprehension. It comes from Deutsch, or German, and the error has been perpetuated in the expression Pennsylvania Dutch—who are generally not Dutch at all but German.

Names are in the most literal sense big business. With the increasing globalization of commerce, it is becoming harder and harder to find names that are both inoffensive and pronounceable throughout the world. Some idea of the scope of the problem can be seen in the experience of a British company when it decided to sell its vintage port, Cockburn’s Dry Tang, in Scandinavia. When it didn’t sell well in Sweden the company investigated and learned that tang means “seaweed” in Swedish, and clearly the name “dry seaweed” was not conjuring up the requisite image of quality and premium taste that would lead Swedes to buy it by the sackful. So, at the suggestion of the Swedish importers, the company changed the name on the label to Dry Cock, which sounds very silly to English speakers, but which was a big hit with the Swedes. However, sales immediately plummeted in Denmark. Urgent investigations showed that cock there signifies, of all things, the female genitalia. So yet another name had to be devised. Such are the hazards of international marketing.

Standard Oil, when it decided to change its name, considered Enco until it discovered that enco in Japanese means “stalled car.” Gallaher’s, another British company, tried to market a cigarette called Park Lane in Spain, but without much success. It wasn’t that it meant anything offensive, but Spaniards simply couldn’t pronounce it and were embarrassed to order it. On the other hand, companies do sometimes make something of a virtue of having unusual or difficult names, as with Häagen-Dazs ice cream.

Extraordinary amounts of money and effort are sometimes pumped into the naming of products. A typical example, cited by the London Sunday Times, was a Swiss confectionery company that commissioned the British trademark specialist John Murphy to come up with an arresting name for a new Swiss candy bar. With the aid of a computer spewing out random names and of groups of specialists who do little more than sit around and think up possible names, Murphy’s firm came up with 350 suggestions. But of these the company rejected 302 because they weren’t considered sufficiently zippy and delectable, and of the 48 remaining possibilities only 2 were not registered somewhere in the world. Murphy himself has had the same problem. His company is called Novamark in Britain but elsewhere trades as Inter Brand because the name was already taken elsewhere.

Because of these difficulties, brand names are heavily defended. Rolls-Royce, the car group, deals with about 500 trademark infringement cases a year (mostly plumbers advertising themselves as “the Rolls-Royce of plumbers” and that sort of thing). Other companies have been less vigilant, or at least less successful. Aspirin, cellophane, yo-yo, and escalator were all once brand names that lost their protection. Many words that are still brand names are often used by the public as if they were not—Band-Aid, Frisbee, Jell-O, Coke, Kleenex, Xerox, and, in England, Hoover, which has achieved the unusual distinction there of becoming the common term for both the appliance and the action (“Did you hoover the carpet?”). There are obvious commercial benefits in forcing your competitors to describe their products as “cola-flavored soft drinks” or “gelatin dessert.”

Despite the efforts involved in building up a good name, a little over a thousand companies a year in the United States opt to change their names. Sometimes this is because of mergers or takeovers, and sometimes, as with USX (formerly U.S. Steel) or Tambrands (formerly Tampax) it is because the company no longer wants to be associated with one particular product. And sometimes, frankly, it’s because of an ill-judged whim. In 1987, the chairman of United Airlines, Richard Ferris, spent some $7 million changing the company’s name from UAL, Inc., to Allegis. It was widely greeted as a disaster. The New York developer Donald Trump said the name sounded like the “next world class disease” [quoted in The New York Times, June 14, 1987]. After just six weeks, Ferris was deposed. One of his successor’s first moves was to change the name back to United Airlines.

Other name changes have been less disastrous but still of questionable benefit to the company. Fewer than 60 percent of people polled in 1987 knew that Esmark was an American conglomerate—about as many as remembered Swift, the name it had changed from twelve years before. Other companies whose former identities have been submerged for better or worse in new names are Unisys (formed from the merger of Burroughs and Sperry), Trinova (formerly Libbey-Owens-Ford), and Citibank (from First National City Bank).

When a company changes its name, the procedure is generally much the same as when a name is sought for a new candy bar or washing powder. Usually the company appoints a name specialist such as Novamark or Lippincott & Margulies. The specialist then comes up with several hundred or even thousand potential names. These may be suggested by employees or by panels of people chosen for the occasion, or simply churned out randomly by computers. Typically three-quarters of the names must be discarded because they are already trademarked or because they mean something offensive or inappropriate somewhere in the world.

If you are thinking of launching a new product yourself, I can tell you that among the names you cannot use are Sic, Pschitt, Plopp, and Super Piss. The first two are the names of soft drinks in France, the third is a candy bar in Taiwan, and the fourth is a Finnish deicer. Sorry.