Made In America - Bill Bryson [73]
Early on the board established thirteen guiding principles. The first of these was the sensible conclusion that in general it would be best to follow local custom. Unfortunately, this was not consistent with the other twelve, all of which called for some deviation or other from historic practice. One ruling was that places should be shorn of unnecessary punctuation, so that Coeur d’Alêne lost its stately circumflex (though not its apostrophe) and San José was deprived of a sliver of its Spanish heritage.22 At the same time, all towns terminating in -burgh were instructed to change to -burg, while all those ending in -borough were henceforth to read -boro. Deviant spellings like Centre were ordered Americanized. City and Town, the board decreed, should be removed from place names, and names involving multiple words should be made one word, so that all the New Castles and La Fayettes became Newcastles and Lafayettes. Many hundreds of names were changed or shortened so that a place as formidably unpronounceable as Popocatepetl Mount in Oregon or Nunathloogagamiutbingoi Dunes, Alaska (at twenty-three letters, the longest name on the American landscape today), is now a rarity.
All of this would have been fractionally more tolerable had it been applied with some degree of consistency, of which the board seemed wholly incapable. It couldn’t even settle on a name for itself. After starting as the Board on Geographic Names, it became the Geographic Board, then the Board on Geographical Names and now is once again the Board on Geographic Names.
In consequence of its decisions, American toponymic spelling lost much of its distinctiveness and charm, and a good deal of its clarity (an outsider could make a better stab at pronouncing Wilks-Barré than Wilks-Barre), without gaining anything much in the way of uniformity. Its decisions had an air of whimsicality. It took the apostrophe out of Pikes Peak, but left it in Martha’s Vineyard. It ordered hundreds of communities to amalgamate their names – making all the El Dorados into Eldorados, for instance but quickly realized that no one would accept Newyork or Losangeles or Elpaso. It threw out hundreds of Indian names, but kept hundreds of others. Almost its only act of incontestable virtue was to try to ameliorate racist names – changing Chinaman’s Springs to Chinese Springs, Nigger Creek to Negro Creek and so on – but even here it didn’t generally begin to act until the 1960s, long after they had become an embarrassment.23
On the matter of -burg and -boro terminations, however, the board was nothing short of relentless, and even now you can search a gazetteer long and hard before you find an exception to these two terminations. The main and most obvious one is Pittsburgh, which, curiously, often styled itself Pittsburg before the board came along and got the city’s collective dander up. (Pittsburgh was named, incidentally, for the British statesman William Pitt by a Scottish immigrant who almost certainly intended it to be pronounced ‘pittsburra’.) In 1891, in one of its earliest decisions, the board ordered the city to call itself Pittsburg. The Post Office diligently followed its instructions, but almost everyone else became resentful, and most of the city’s leading institutions – the University of Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh Stock Exchange, the Pittsburgh Gazette newspaper – refused to buckle under. After twenty years of squabbling, the board finally reversed its decision and on 19 July 1911 the city officially became Pittsburgh.24
Just as hundreds of towns have changed their names, so too have states. Maine was once New Somerset. New Jersey was briefly called Albania and later bore the