Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: Where Do Place Names Come From?

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus is dated October 14 but in fact was published today, October 21. (Long story short: staffing issues.) It’s on a subject I’ve been researching for a while: the origins of place names. Full access to the column is restricted for three months to subscribers; here’s an excerpt:

The influence of commerce on place naming goes back at least to the 19th century. Company towns, where a single business is the main or sole employer, were often named for their benefactors: Fordlandia in Brazil, Grand-Hornu in Belgium, Manville in New Jersey. In 1845, the chief engineer of the Georgia Railroad, J. Edgar Thomson, took it upon himself to rename a tiny hamlet in northern Georgia that had been known first as simply Terminus and then as Marthasville, after the daughter of an ex-governor. “Certain ungallant railroad men,” wrote George R. Stewart in Names on the Land (1945), “looked upon Marthasville as a namby-pamby name for a place which was undoubtedly to become a great center.” Thomson had a better idea: “Atlanta, the terminus of the Western & Atlantic Railroad. Atlantic, masculine; Atlanta, feminine—a coined word—and if you think it will suit, adapt it.” They did.

Read the rest of the column, which includes the origin stories of Novi, Michigan; Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; and Selmer, Tennessee, among other colorful places.

And in case you missed it, here’s a story I wrote last month for Medium about the decision to change the name of the Squaw Valley Ski Resort—and other “squaw” names on the map.

New on Medium: The valley of the S-word

It was big news in California and Nevada last week when the 72-year-old Lake Tahoe resort formerly known as the Squaw Valley Ski Resort announced its new name: Palisades Tahoe. This was no ordinary rebranding but an acknowledgment that the old name had become irreparably tainted by racist and sexist associations.

In my latest Medium story, “The Valley of the S-word,” I look at the history of squaw, from an innocuous Algonquian word for “woman” to an epithet so charged that the Palisades Tahoe website dares not write its name. Every reference is now expressed as “S*.”

Read, clap, and comment here. And consider becoming a paid Medium member to support writing like mine.

Blog extras!

1. According to H.L. Mencken’s The American Language, the hugely influential gossip columnist Walter Winchell (1897–1972) was responsible for popularizing the slangy usage of squaw to mean “wife.” Other Winchellisms include Reno-vated (divorced), profanuage (profane language), and infanticipate (to expect a baby; pregnant was for many years a taboo word in the media).

2. Squaw man first entered the American language in 1856 to denote a non-Indigenous man married to an Indigenous woman. The Squaw Man was a 1905 play written by Edwin Milton Royle that ran for 222 performances on Broadway and enjoyed four revivals between 1907 and 1921. It was adapted three times into feature movies, in 1914, 1918, and 1931. All three versions were directed by Cecil B. DeMille.

Poster art for the 1931 Squaw Man, starring Warner Baxter, Lupe Velez, Eleanor Boardman, and Charles Bickford.