Dan at Notes from the Copy Editor has written a terrific series of posts about the U.S. Board on Geographic Names (the link is to an introductory post; scroll down to link to the other posts).
Among his gleanings:
- "According to the U.S. Board on Geographic Names FAQ, at last count Fairview was the most common community name in the U.S., with 288 occurrences. Midway, formerly the frontrunner, came in at 256."
- "Contrary to popular belief, only 34 states have a community named Springfield; however, Riverside appears in 46 different states, with 'only Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, and Oklahoma not having a community so named.'"
- "'What are the only two U.S. states without counties?' would be a good trivia question. Likewise, 'What are the four states officially known as commonwealths?'"
- "The U.S. government is stingy with apostrophes in its official names; the most notorious case is probably Pike's Peak, a.k.a. Pikes Peak. Pike's Peak is named after Zebulon Pike, and so Almighty Grammar would dictate an apostrophe... yet the official spelling is Pikes Peak."
- The government won't change a place name "just to match the historical name or even to correct a misspelling." So every petition for renaming "is accompanied by a lengthy proposal summary explaining the history of the old name and the reasoning behind the proposed change." For example:
This proposal is to make official the name Sven Slab for a 91 m (300 ft) wide, 61m (200 ft) high cliff wall in the McDowell Sonoran Preserve, at the north end of the McDowell Mountains. According to the proponent, the name is widely used within the hiking and rock climbing community; the name came into use because Sven power saws were used to cut a trail to the base of the wall.
Read the whole series. And be sure to link through to Mighty Red Pen's post on Alaskan place names, which includes the notorious Chicken story.
By the way--and how very timely, this being Earth Day--my favorite reference on geographical names is Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, edited by Barry Lopez. Within its 447 nicely designed pages you'll find definitions for kiss tank ("a pool of water left from the last rain and its runoff in a naturally formed rock basin"), gunk hole ("In coastal New England ... a small, out-of-the-way harbor or a nearly unnavigable shallow cover or channel"), paternoster lake (literally "our father": a circular lake found in a linear chain within a U-shaped valley; so called because of the chain's resemblance to a string of rosary beads), and much more.
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