Parts of Speech: Essays on English

by Brander Matthews

In the later stanzas Mr. Butler denounces changes nearer to New York:

Down there, on old Manhattan,
Where land-sharks breed and fatten,
They wiped out Tubby Hook.
That famous promontory,
Renowned in song and story,
Which time nor tempest shook,
Whose name for aye had been good,
Stands newly christened “Inwood,”
And branded with the shame
Of some old rogue who passes
By dint of aliases,
Afraid of his own name!
See how they quite outrival
Plain barn-yard Spuyten Duyvil
By peacock Riverdale,
Which thinks all else it conquers,
And over homespun Yonkers
Spreads out its flaunting tail!

No loyal Manhattaner but would regret to part with Spuyten Duyvil and Yonkers and Harlem, and the other good old names that recall the good old Dutchmen who founded New Amsterdam. Few loyal Manhattaners, I think, but would be glad to see the Greater New York (now at last an accomplished fact) dignified by a name less absurd than New York. If Pesth and Buda could come together and become Budapest, why may not the Greater New York resume the earlier name and be known to the world as Manhattan? Why should the people of this great city of ours let the Anglo-Saxons “Nicodemus us to nothing,” or less than nothing, with a name so pitiful as New York? “I hope and trust,” wrote Washington Irving, “that we are to live to be an old nation, as well as our neighbors, and have no idea that our cities when they shall have attained to venerable antiquity shall still be dubbed New York and New London and new this and new that, like the Pont Neuf (the new bridge) at Paris, which is the oldest bridge in that capital, or like the Vicar of Wakefield’s horse, which continued to be called the colt until he died of old age.”

Whenever any change shall be made we must hope that the new will be not only more euphonious than the old, but more appropriate and more stately. Perhaps Hangtown in California made a change for the better many years ago when it took the name of Placerville; but perhaps Placerville was not the best name it could have taken. “We will be nothing but Anglo-Saxons in the old world or in the new,” wrote Matthew Arnold when he was declaring the beauty of Celtic literature; “and when our race has built Bold Street in Liverpool, and pronounced it very good, it hurries across the Atlantic, and builds Nashville and Jacksonville and Milledgeville, and thinks it is fulfilling the designs of Providence in an incomparable manner.” In this sentence the criticism cuts both British habits and American. Later in life Matthew Arnold sharpened his knife again for use on the United States alone. “What people,” he asked, “in whom the sense for beauty and fitness was quick, could have invented or tolerated the hideous names ending in ville—the Briggsvilles, Higginsvilles, Jacksonvilles—rife from Maine to Florida?”

Now, it must be confessed at once that we have no guard against a thrust like that. Such names do abound and they are of unsurpassed hideousness. But could not the same blow have got home as fatally had it been directed against his own country? A glance at any gazetteer of the British Isles would show that the British are quite as vulnerable as the Americans. In fact, this very question of Matthew Arnold’s suggested to an anonymous American rimester the perpetration of a copy of verses, the quality of which can be gaged by these first three stanzas:

Of Briggsville and Jacksonville
I care not now to sing;
They make me sad and very mad—
My inmost soul they wring.
I’ll hie me back to England,
And straightway I will go
To Boxford and to Swaffham,
To Plunger and Loose Hoe.
At Scrooby and at Gonerby,
At Wigton and at Smeeth,
At Bottesford and Runcorn,
I need not grit my teeth.
At Swineshead and at Crummock,
At Sibsey and Spithead,
Stoke Poges and Wolsoken
I will not wish me dead.
At Horbling and at Skidby,
At Chipping Ongar, too,
At Botterel Stotterdon and Swops,
At Skellington and Skew,
At Piddletown and Blumsdown,
At Shanklin and at Smart,
At Gosberton and Wrangle
I’ll soothe this aching heart.

To discover a mote in our neighbor’s eyes does not remove the mote in our own, however much immediate relief it may give us from the acuteness of our pain. When Matthew Arnold animadverted upon “the jumbles of unnatural and inappropriate names everywhere,” he may have had in mind the most absurd medley existing anywhere in the world—the handful of Greek and Roman names of all sorts which was sown broadcast over the western part of New York State. Probably this region of misfortune it was that Irving was thinking about when he denounced the “shallow affectation of scholarship,” and told how “the whole catalog of ancient worthies is shaken out of the back of Lemprière’s Classical Dictionary, and a wide region of wild country is sprinkled over with the names of heroes, poets, sages of antiquity, jumbled into the most whimsical juxtaposition.”

Along the road from Dublin, going south to Bray, the traveler finds Dumdrum and Stillorgan, as tho—to quote the remarks of the Irish friend who gave me these facts—a band of wandering musicians had broken up and scattered their names along the highway. For sheer ugliness it would be hard to beat two other proper names near Dublin, where the Sallynoggin road runs into the Glenageary.

It may be that these words sound harsher in our strange ears than they do to a native wonted to their use. We take the unknown for the magnificent sometimes, no doubt; but sometimes also we take it for the ridiculous. To us New-Yorkers, for instance, there is nothing absurd or ludicrous in the sturdy name of Schenectady; perhaps there is even a hint of stateliness in the syllables. But when Mr. Laurence Hutton was in the north of Scotland some years ago there happened to be in his party a young lady from that old Dutch town; and when a certain laird who lived in those parts chanced to be told that this young lady dwelt in Schenectady he was moved to inextinguishable laughter. He ejaculated the outlandish sounds again and again in the sparse intervals of his boisterous merriment. He announced to all his neighbors that among their visitors was a young lady from Schenectady, and all who called were presented to her, and at every repetition of the strange syllables his violent cachinnations broke forth afresh. Never had so comic a name fallen upon his ears; and yet he himself was the laird of Balduthro (pronounced Balduthy); his parish was Ironcross (pronounced Aron-crouch); his railway-station was Kilconquhar (pronounced Kinŏcher); and his post-office was Pittenweem!

Robert Louis Stevenson was a Scotchman who had changed his point of view more often than the laird of Balduthro; he had a broader vision and a more delicate ear and a more refined perception of humor. When he came to these United States as an amateur immigrant on his way across the plains, he asked the name of a river from a brakeman on the train; and when he heard that the stream “was called the Susquehanna, the beauty of the name seemed part and parcel of the beauty of the land. As when Adam with divine fitness named the creatures, so this word Susquehanna was at once accepted by the fancy. That was the name, as no other could be, for that shining river and desirable valley.”