Spyke

Bostonia just doesn't work as well as Portlandia.

Spelling it out made me wonder: theres a Portland, Iowa (Portland, IA) too!

8

Minneapolis Kansas is named after how small it is. They uh... They don't know what Minneapolis means.

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d00eryreply
lemmy.world

This frequently occurred when settlers named their new settlements after the regions or cities they emigrated from.

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lemmy.today

One was a river crossing point used by the Frankish tribes, the other was just this dude Frank that built a fort and was so awesome of a guy people just wanted to live around him.

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I can't tell if this is a joke. If you were German I would know it's not one but there's no earthly way to tell otherwise

4

But only one of them is named after a fortress built from sausages.

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Soggyreply
lemmy.world

"Stole" is a strong word for the very common behavior of naming things after a favored place or person, or aspirationally with something greater. There's a lot of recognizable city names in the Americas because a bunch of Europeans came over all at once, but it happened in Australia too (hence names like Victoria and New South Wales) and all over Africa (There's a Worcester in South Africa, a Sussex in Sierra Leone) but a modern push to decolonize names like that has made them somewhat less common. And there's a million places named after saints or monarchs.

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nandeEbisureply
lemmy.world

It's more a metaphorical usage of that phrase. Every word is stolen from another language.

It's more that it can get a bit confusing, have had multiple times living there where they thought I was talking about the city in one state and I meant a different one.

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"Stole" carries a lot of moral baggage, it implies illicit or underhanded behavior.

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sh.itjust.works

Portland OR was named after Portland ME because a guy won a coin toss and named it after his home town. The other guy wanted to name it "Boston."

Before that it was known as "The Clearing".

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"how about we call the state washington and the city can be springfield?"
"Jeremiah you're a genius, now let's go kill some natives to celebrate"

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lemmy.world

I'm still salty about the Geoguessr game where I found the city name on the street sign and still missed by 3000 miles.

But speaking of the wrong Portland, just wait until you learn about Springfield.

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over_cloxreply
lemmy.world

Damn yo, I didn't even know that much about it.

I guess Texas is just that big, that it includes New York and Athens, Greece..

WTF indeed...

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aussie.zone

We went there during a trip to the US and I made hilarious Facebook posts about "oh no, we accidentally flew to the wrong Paris" with the little Eiffel Tower with a cowboy hat on it in the background.

Got like 7 likes. Shit was so cash.

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I got another. Athens, Georgia is only 246 miles from Cairo, Georgia. No they don’t pronounce the latter like in Egypt

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If we're listing weird town names taken from other states, may I present the town of Jersey Shore, Pennsylvania?

Which, as it happens, is over 2 hours away from New Jersey and its only shores are on rivers.

The story on the Wikipedia page is that the men who planned out the settlement (originally called Waynesburg) had moved there from New Jersey. There was a rivalry with the town on the opposite side of the river, so the people in that town started calling Waynesburg the "Jersey Shore." The nickname held on, and the town officially adopted the name in 1826.

Though I can only imagine how the residents felt about the name during the dark times of 2009-2012.

4

Random fact: it's because of a rich entrepreneur from Portland that my small native town in Québec got a railway in 1850. The first international railway was between Portland and Montréal. It still exists.

The line was proposed as a connection between Portland and Sherbrooke, Canada East, in 1844 by Portland entrepreneur John A. Poor. Portland was desperate to connect its ice-free port with Montreal, and Maine was at risk of being eclipsed by a similar proposal running from nearby Boston, Massachusetts.

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