'A Songful, Tuneful Land'

"None can care for literature in itself who do not take a special pleasure in the sound of names; and there is no part of the world where nomenclature is so rich, poetical, humorous, and picturesque as the United States of America.” 

Robert Louis Stevenson means place names. He’s writing in The Amateur Emigrant (1895), an account of his journey from Scotland to California in 1879-80. Presumably every nation has towns with exotic or otherwise memorable names but often it takes an outsider to notice them. In his next sentence he writes: “All times, races, and languages have brought their contribution. Pekin is in the same State with Euclid, with Bellefontaine, and with Sandusky.” That’s my home state, Ohio, where “Bellefontaine” is pronounced “Bell-FOUN-tin” to rhyme with “mountain,” though the French means “beautiful spring.” I lived for several years in Sandusky County. The city is on the shore of Lake Erie. Its name derives from the Wyandot word for “water.” There you have the United Nations of Ohio: China, Greece, France and Native America.

 

An editor and I were once studying a U.S. Geological Survey map of upstate New York, looking for hamlets and other forgotten places that I could write about. We happened on Swastika, N.Y., deep in the Adirondacks. Six miles to its north is Russia. Nearby are Peru, Jericho and Owls Head. Two-hundred some miles to the southeast is Jerusalem, N.Y. In Indiana, by the way, “Peru,” the Hoosier birthplace of Cole Porter, is pronounced “PEA-roo.” Stevenson continues:

 

“The names of the States and Territories themselves form a chorus of sweet and most romantic vocables: Delaware, Ohio, Indiana, Florida, Dakota, Iowa, Wyoming, Minnesota, and the Carolinas; there are few poems with a nobler music for the ear: a songful, tuneful land; and if the new Homer shall arise from the Western continent, his verse will be enriched, his pages sing spontaneously, with the names of states and cities that would strike the fancy in a business circular.”

 

In The American Language (1921), H.L. Mencken develops a taxonomy of American place names, identifying eight sources:

 

“(a) those embodying personal names, chiefly the surnames of pioneers or of national heroes; (b) those transferred from other and older places, either in the eastern states or in Europe; (c) Indian names; (d) Dutch, Spanish, French, German and Scandinavian names; (e) Biblical and mythological names; (f) names descriptive of localities; (g) names suggested by the local flora, fauna or geology; (h) purely fanciful names. The names of the first class are perhaps the most numerous.”

 

Presumably, Mencken would classify “Swastika” as “purely fanciful,” attributing it to what he calls “the rough humor of the country.”