Authors: Bill Bryson
However, what America does possess in abundance is a legacy of colorful names. A mere sampling: Chocolate Bayou, Dime Box, Ding Dong, and Lick Skillet, Texas; Sweet. Gum Head, Louisi-ana; Whynot, Mississippi; Zzyzx Springs, California; Coldass Creek, Stiffknee Knob, and Rabbit Shuffle, North Carolina; Scratch Ankle, Alabama; Fertile, Minnesota; Climax, Michigan; Intercourse, Pennsylvania; Breakabeen, New York; What Cheer, Iowa; Bear Wallow, Mud Lick, Minnie Mousie, Eighty-Eight, and Bug, Kentucky; Dull, Only, Peeled Chestnut, Defeated, and Nameless, Tennessee; Cozy Corners, Wisconsin; Humptulips, Washington; Hog Heaven, Idaho; Ninety-Six, South Carolina; Potato Neck, Maryland; Why, Arizona; Dead Bastard Peak, Crazy Woman Creek, and the unsurpassable Maggie's Nipples, Wyoming.
Many of these names, alas, have been changed, but quite a few still exist, and some places make a living out of their curious cog-nomens, most notably Intercourse, Pennsylvania, which does a brisk trade in double entendre postcards. Others draw crowds only occasionally, as with Eighty-Eight, Kentucky, on which attention naturally focused during 1988. One couple came all the way from Casper, Wyoming, to be married on the eighth day of the eighth month of 1988 at 8:o8
P.M.
in Eighty-Eight. The story goes that the town got its unusual name when the founder, one Dabnie Nun-nally, reached in his pocket and found he had eighty-eight cents there. In 1948, for what it's worth, eighty-eight people from zo8
NAMES
Eighty-Eight voted for Truman and eighty-eight voted for Dewey.
It doesn't take a whole lot, it would appear, to persuade people to change their town names. In 195o, in response to a challenge from a popular radio show, the people of Hot Springs, New Mex-ico, voted by four to one to rename their town Truth or Conse-quences. Their prize was that Ralph Edwards, the host, broadcast his tenth anniversary show from there. The thrill of that occasion was presumably short-lived, but the name has stuck. Four years later, the widow of the athlete Jim Thorpe agreed to have her husband buried in the mountain resort of Mauch Chunk, Pennsyl-vania, if the people there would rename the town after her hus-band, and they did. Cody, Wyoming, did the same thing for Buffalo Bill Cody.
In addition to giving places colorful names, the early settlers tended to give their states colorful—if not always terribly flattering—nicknames. Nebraska was once called the Bugeating State and Missouri was the Puke State. Sometimes these nick-names have stuck but nobody is quite sure why. Everybody knows that Indiana is the Hoosier State, but nobody now seems to know what a Hoosier is or ever was. Similarly nobody seems too sure of why Iowa calls itself the Hawkeye State.
Often the names we know places by are nothing like the names the locals use. In Italian, it's not Florence but Firenze, not Naples but Napoli, not Padua but Padova, not Venice but Venezia, not Milan but Milano, not Genoa but Genova. To the Danes it's not Copenhagen but Kobenhavn (pronounced "koopen-howen"). To the Yugoslavians it's not Belgrade but Beograd. To the Russians it's not Moscow but Moskva. And to the Dutch it's not The Hague but Den Haag. The names of countries are even more at variance with their English versions. Try covering up the left-hand column below and seeing how many you can guess.
Greece
Ellinki Dimokratia
Finland
Suomen Tasavalta
Hungary
Magyar NepkOztarasag
Albania
Shqipéri
Japan
Nihon
THE MOTHER TONGUE
Greenland
Kalatdlit Nunat
Jordan
Al Mamlaka al Urduniya al Hashemiyah
South Korea
Han Kook
North Korea
Chosun Minchu-chui Immin Kongwha-guk
Morocco
al-Mamlaka al-Maghrebia
China
Zhonghua Renmin Gonghe Guo
Sweden
Konungariket Sverige
Tonga
Friendly Islands
There are a variety of reasons for this. Sometimes the names we use are simply imposed by outsiders with scant regard for local nomenclature. Korea, for instance, is a Japanese name, not a Ko-rean one. Hungary is a Latin name adapted from Old Russian and thus has nothing to do with the name used by the Hungarians themselves. Bosporus, the name for the strait linking Europe to Asia, is simply the Greek translation of
Oxford.
The local Turks call it Karadeniz Bogazi.
Often place-names arise from mishearings or misunderstand-ings—notably the West Indies, which of course have nothing to do with India. They simply reflect Columbus's startling inability to determine which hemisphere he was in. Yucatan in Mexico means
"What?" or "What are you saying?"—the reply given by the natives to the first Spanish conquistadors to fetch up on their shores. The term
Dutch
is similarly based on a total misapprehension. It comes from Deutsch, or German, and the error has been perpetuated in the expression Pennsylvania Dutch—who are generally not Dutch at all but German.
Names are in the most literal sense big business. With the in-creasing globalization of commerce, it is becoming harder and harder to find names that are both inoffensive and pronounceable throughout the world. Some idea of the scope of the problem can be seen in the experience of a British company when it decided to sell its vintage port, Cockburn's Dry Tang, in Scandinavia. When it didn't sell well in Sweden the company investigated and learned that
tang
means "seaweed" in Swedish, and clearly the name "dry seaweed" was not conjuring up the requisite image of quality and premium taste that would lead Swedes to buy it by the sackful. So,
NAMES
at the suggestion of the Swedish importers, the company changed the name on the label to Dry Cock, which sounds very silly to English speakers, but which was a big hit with the Swedes. How-ever, sales immediately plummeted in Denmark. Urgent investi-gations showed that
cock
there signifies, of all things, the female genitalia. So yet another name had to be devised. Such are the hazards of international marketing.
Standard Oil, when it decided to change its name, considered Enco until it discovered that
enco in
Japanese means "stalled car."
Gallaher's, another British company, tried to market a cigarette called Park Lane in Spain, but without much success. It wasn't that it meant anything offensive, but Spaniards simply couldn't pro-nounce it and were embarrassed to order it. On the other hand, companies do sometimes make something of a virtue of having unusual or difficult names, as with Haagen-Dazs ice cream.
Extraordinary amounts of money and effort are sometimes pumped into the naming of products. A typical example, cited by the London Sunday
Times,
was of a Swiss confectionery company that commissioned the British trademark specialist John Murphy to come up with an arresting name for a new Swiss candy bar. With the aid of a computer spewing out random names and of groups of specialists who do little more than sit around and think up possible names, Murphy's
firm came
up with 35o suggestions. But of these the company rejected
302
because they weren't considered suffi-ciently zippy and delectable, and of the 48 remaining possibilities only
2
were not registered somewhere in the world. Murphy him-self has had the same problem. His company is called Novamark in Britain but elsewhere trades as Inter Brand because the name was already taken elsewhere.
Because of these difficulties, brand names are heavily defended.
Rolls-Royce, the car group, deals with about 50o trademark in-fringement cases a year (mostly plumbers advertising themselves as "the Rolls-Royce of plumbers" and that sort of thing). Other companies have been less vigilant, or at least less successful. As-pirin, cellophane, yo-yo, and escalator were all once brand names that lost their protection. Many words that are still brand names are often used by the public as if they were not—Band-Aid, Fris-
THE MOTHER TONGUE
bee, Je11-0, Coke, Kleenex, Xerox, and, in England, Hoover, which has achieved the unusual distinction there of becoming the common term for both the appliance and the action ("Did you hoover the carpet?"). There are obvious commercial benefits in forcing your competitors to describe their products as "cola-flavored soft drinks" or "gelatin dessert."
Despite the efforts involved in building up a good name, a little over a thousand companies a year in the United States opt to change their names. Sometimes this is because of mergers or take-overs, and sometimes, as with USX (formerly U.S. Steel) or Tam-brands (formerly Tampax) it is because the company no longer wants to be associated with one particular product. And some-times, frankly, it's because of an ill-judged whim. In 1987, the chairman of United Airlines, Richard Ferris, spent some $ 7 million changing the company's name from UAL, Inc., to Allegis. It was widely greeted as a disaster. The New York developer Donald Trump said the name sounded like the "next world class disease."
[ Quoted in
The New York Times,
June 14, 1987] After just six weeks, Ferris was deposed. One of his successor's first moves was to change the name back to United Airlines.
Other name changes have been less disastrous but still of ques-tionable benefit to the company. Fewer than 6o percent of people polled in 1987 knew that Esmark was an American conglomerate—about as many as remembered Swift, the name it had changed from twelve years before. Other companies whose former identities have been submerged for better or worse in new names are Unisys (formed from the merger of Burroughs and Sperry), Trinova (for-merly Libbey-Owens-Ford), and Citibank (from First National City Bank).
When a company changes name, the procedure is generally much the same as when a name is sought for a new candy bar or washing powder. Usually the company appoints a name specialist such as Novamark or Lippincott & Margulies. The specialist then comes up with several hundred or even thousand potential names.
These may be suggested by employees or by panels of people chosen for the occasion, or simply churned out randomly by com-puters. Typically three quarters of the names must be discarded
NAMES
because they are already trademarked or because they mean some-thing offensive or inappropriate somewhere in the world.
If you are thinking of launching a new product yourself, I can tell you that among the names you cannot use are Sic, Pschitt, Plopp, and Super Piss. The first two are the names of soft drinks in France, the third is a candy bar in Taiwan, and the fourth is a Finnish deicer. Sorry.
14.
SWEARING
AMONG THE CHINESE, TO BE CALLED A
turtle is the worst possible taunt. In Norwegian,
devil
is highly taboo—roughly equivalent to our
fuck.
Among the Xoxa tribe of South Africa the most provocative possible remark is
hlebeshako-
your mother's ears." In French it is a grave insult to call someone a cow or a camel and the effect is considerably intensified if you precede it with
espece de
("kind of") so that it is worse in French to be called a kind of a cow than to be called just a cow. The worst insult among Australian aborigines is to suggest that the target have intercourse with his mother. Incest is in fact so serious in many cultures that often it need be implied in only the vaguest terms, as with
to madre in
Spanish and
your mama
among blacks in America.
Often national terms of abuse are nonsensical, as in the German
schweinehund,
which means "pig-dog."
Some cultures don't swear at all. The Japanese, Malayans, and most Polynesians and American Indians do not have native swear words. The Finns, lacking the sort of words you need to describe your feelings when you stub your toe getting up to answer a wrong number at 2:0o A.M., rather oddly adopted the word
ravintolassa.
It means "in the restaurant."
But most cultures swear and have been doing so for a very long time. Dr. J. N. Adams of Manchester University in England stud-ied swearing by Romans and found that they had Boo "dirty" words (for want of a better expression). We, by contrast, have only about twenty or so, depending on how you define the term. The Rating Code Office of Hollywood has a list of seventeen seriously objec-tionable words that will earn a motion picture a mandatory R rat-
S WEARING
ing. If you add in all the words that are not explicitly taboo but are still socially doubtful—words like
crap
and
boobs—the
number rises to perhaps fifty or sixty words in common use. Once there were many more. More than
1,200
words just for
sexual inter-
course
have been counted.
According to Dr. Adams's findings, certain things have not changed in 1,500 years, most notably a preoccupation with the size of the male member, for which the Romans provided many names, among them
tool, dagger, sickle, tiller, stake, sword,
and (a little oddly perhaps)
worm.
Even more oddly, the two most common Roman slang words for the penis were both feminine, while the most common word for female genitalia was masculine.
Swearing seems to have some near-universal qualities. In almost all cultures, swearing involves one or more of the following: filth, the forbidden (particularly incest), and the sacred, and usually all three. Most cultures have two levels of swearing—relatively mild and highly profane. Ashley Montagu, in
The Anatomy of Swearing,
cites a study of swearing among the Wik Monkan natives of the Cape York Peninsula. They have many insults which are generally regarded as harmless teasing—big
head, long nose, skinny arms—
and a whole body of very much more serious ones, which are uttered only in circumstances of high emotion. Among the latter are
big penis, plenty
urine, and vagina woman
mad.
English is unusual in including the impossible and the pleasur-able in its litany of profanities. It is a strange and little-noted idiosyncrasy of our tongue that when we wish to express extreme fury we entreat the object of our rage to undertake an anatomical impossibility or, stranger still, to engage in the one activity that is bound to give him more pleasure than almost anything else. Can there be, when you think about it, a more improbable sentiment than "Get fucked!" We might as well snarl, "Make a lot of money!-or "Have a nice day!"