Names absolutely fascinate me.. I don't know why. Especially place names. Edinburgh, Timbuktu, Hell's Kitchen. Names can be so incredibly vivid and colourful. Sometimes, as in Portland, they are descriptive. Other times, as in Kalamazoo, they are nonsense to me yet just as colourful. City neighbourhoods are always interesting. Some of them are very typical and found in many cities. The Garment District. The East End. Chinatown. The Old Port. Others, like SoHo, Quincy Market, Times Square and Piccadilly Circus are unique to one place.
Sometimes, though, the most interesting of all are the subway stops.
Suitland and Foggy Bottom in D.C.
Haymarket, Government Center and Ruggles in Boston.
The farther you go, the more weird the names start to sound.
Angrignon, Lionel-Groulx, and Pie-IX in Montreal.
Over on the tube they have Goodge Street and Ealing Broadway and Putney Bridge and Uxbridge.
Garbatella and the Circo Massimo in Rome.
Kasumigaseki and Kasuradamon in Tokyo.. surely normal names to a Japanese but weird enough to me.
Then there are names people give to actual pieces of geography. Not areas or cities but real physical things like mountains and valleys.
Dead Man's Curve. Death Valley. Saddleback Mountain. Pike's Peak. Huertgen Forest. The Isle of Mann.
There are great areas of land that are loosely defined, too. Upstate New York. The Eastern Townships (East of Montreal). The Russian Steppe. The Mississippi Delta. The Sahara.
Which brings us to names of waterways, lakes, and seas. The Amazon, the Nile, and the Mississippi. Wassokeag, Moosehead, and Flagstaff. The Caspian, the Dead, and the North.
Names are just cool. I have no point. That is all.