What’s In A Name? You’d Be Surprised

What’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare. Plenty, the ancient Greeks might have answered, including not only the etymon, the essence of a word, but the magical relationship between the word and the thing for which it stands. Confucius went a step further. His dictum of Cheng Ming declared that the true nature of a thing can only be recognized if the thing has the right name.

Most of us give some thought to naming. What makes the job easier is that names usually come from other names. America was named for the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who Ralph Waldo Emerson, a fan of Christopher Columbus, later called the “lying pickle dealer of Seville.”

Wabasso, like the mirror writing of Leonardo da Vinci, is Ossabaw (a town in Georgia) spelled backwards. Gem Island was named after Gem of the Sea, a Union gunboat that patrolled the Indian River during the Civil War. Fellsmere is a combination of the founder’s name (E. Nelson Fell) and the word mere which means a watery place.

Some designations are permutations of other languages like Seminole, the name given to the Creeks who invaded Florida. The Spanish called these renegades Cimmaron but a liquid “l” soon took the place of the “ro” sound that Creeks did not make. Ponce de Leon did not name Florida after landing and observing an abundance of flowers. He tagged the territory after the Feast of Flowers at Easter, Pascua Florida, the season of his arrival. Had the Spanish explorer not been beached in April, our state might have been named after the more abundant palmetto bug, in which case we might all be residents of the State of  Cucaracha.

Developers share the same perks as explorers. They may not kiss the ground but they get to name it. Yeehaw, begun as a western extension of the railroad, was named by Henry Flagler, founder of the Florida East Coast Railway. Flagler claimed he chose the name Yeehaw after the Seminole word for wolf; Yeehaw is also the sound a donkey makes. Since two of  Flagler’s cypress-bearing locomotives disappeared into the peat of Blue Cypress marsh, the railroad magnate might have been commenting on the skill of his engineers.

Read the entire article in the February 2009 issue