True Names

I love finding places or things that have True Names.

A True Name is given to a place or thing by the people who find it or create it or use it and not by some marketing guy. The town where I grew up in Connecticut was pretty good at True Names. Within the town were neighborhoods named for the original families: Mungertown was where the Mungers lived and had their lumber business. Nortontown and Allentown were where the Nortons and Allens had settled. (I went to school with kids from all three families.) I lived on Durham Road which, logically, was the road from our town to Durham where the name changed to Madison Road since, for them, it was obviously the road to our town.

Almost any place name given since the opening of suburbia has not been true. This goes for the streets, developments, malls, etc. Places without True Names are artificial and lacking in history (or really any context at all).

Around here, the developers who created this town from scratch in the late '60s at least tried to avoid the cutesiest names. Most of the local streets are merely numbered and given compass coordinates. This allowed for a lot of repetition and avoided the need for imagination. We live on SW 23rd Terrace (which is not a terrace by the normal definition) which is one block away from SW 23rd Street in one direction and SW 23rd Court in the other (also not a court in the normal definition). There are, of course 21st, 22nd, 24th, 25th, etc. versions of all of these as well as NE, SE, and NW copies of the entire lot. Only the major streets are named. A few are actually functional, i.e., Country Club Road, Pine Island Road, but most are meaningless although they do avoid the saccharin overload syndrome: Del Prado, Santa Barbara.

However, if you can get out of town into the rural, or even better, wilderness, parts of the state it is possible to find True Names. One of the original ways off our peninsula is via Burnt Store Road. There's some history there. There's a neighborhood in Ft. Myers called Whiskey Creek. No marketing guy ever touched that. Southeast of us is Corkscrew Swamp. To the northeast is Nicodemus Slough.

All this came to the fore when I saw a newspaper article yesterday about people objecting to the state pouring sand into Cowbone Marsh because it could disrupt navigation on Fisheating Creek which flows through it. Those are True Names for real places. (And I'm confident the "g" in Fisheating is silent.)