What's in a Name?Everything, according to an amazing book about America.
Posted Monday, June 30, 2008, at 7:17 AM ETA longer version of this essay appears as the introduction to the NYRB Classics reissue of Names on the Land.
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StumbleUponThroughout, Stewart is a great evangelist for the poetry that comes from keeping close to the land, that inscribes into it some of the experience of those who passed by: Cape Fear, Golden Gate, Deadman Creek. "The deepest poetry of a name and its first glory lie, not in liquid sounds, but in all that shines through that name—the hope or terror, or passion or wit, of those who named it. The second glory of a name, as with Marathon or Valley Forge, springs later from the deeds done there."
The image of the melting pot has come to seem hackneyed as it's become clear how stubborn segregation remains and how complicated patterns of assimilation can be. But Names on the Land is a convincing reminder that the metaphor holds much truth, revealing how early the process of Americanization began, how swiftly it advanced, and how resilient it proved to be. Time and again newcomers adopted and adapted local names, and names survived the end of empires. The French ebbed away, but Detroit remained; the Spaniards sailed from the Western shores, but San Diego endured; the Dutch sold up, and though New Amsterdam naturally became New York, the Dutch name for the village of Breukelyn lived on.
Like all great epics, Names on the Land has moments of comedy and of pathos. Chicago may first have meant "onion-place" or "skunk-town." The word podunk, now routinely used to indicate any place comically unworthy of note, originates with poodic, an Indian word for a point of land; settlers along the Maine coast used to say "Go to Poodic!" the way we might say "Get out of here!" Texas originates with the word that a Spanish expedition in 1689 heard from the Indians they encountered there: "Techas! Techas!" or "Friends! Friends!" The original name proposed for the state that became New Jersey was Albania.
Always a great and plain democrat, Stewart evinces a strong sympathy for the persecution of Native Americans, and he decries the presence on the land of so many names belonging to "periwigged lords of London. … What most of them ever did for the colonies to deserve so much as the naming of an out-house would be difficult to discover." But he is no cheap patriot: He derides our national name itself, the United States of America, as too long, too vague, too ugly on the page, too clumsy to say. It is, he says, "the worst misfortune in our whole naming-history," explaining that the abbreviation USA only became popular once it was branded into the stocks of American muskets during the Revolutionary War.
Stewart cites some enticing alternatives: In 1775, newspaperman Philip Freneau banged the drum for Columbia; a generation later, some freedom-loving citizen proposed Fredonia; novelist Washington Irving suggested Alleghania. But as pretty as it may be to imagine a bright and shiny new name, there is something fitting about leaving our cacophonous, patchwork nation saddled with one so graceless and unmusical. And there is something perfectly American about sticking with it despite its imperfections. Stewart, after all, notes that of the four American places named Tokio at the time of the Pearl Harbor bombing, none changed its name. "The state of mind seems to be more strongly than ever that the names now belong to us—to alter them would be repudiation of our own history, weakness rather than strength."
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