Now that we have a page of eponyms (words from people's names), it seems sensibly symmetric to have a page of toponyms (words from places' names).
I enlist your help! May I ask each of you to pull out your thinking cap and toss out a toponym or two or twelve?
A couple of guidelines:
Remember: It may be an real place or an imaginary one [utopia].
Should a word like spartan count as a toponym ("of Sparta") or an eponym ("like people from Sparta")? Arbitrarily, I'll put words like that in the toponyms list.
Somtimes the place-name is merely an obvious descriptor: chedder cheese; French horn, Dijon mustard, Brussels lace. If we were to include such items our list would be hundreds of items long, so let's omit any of this sort unless it has a particularly interesting history or "twist" linguistically. Feel free to use your discretion if it's unclear whether an item is to be omitted as obvious: champagne; bordeaux; jersey [cow].
I found a fascinating discussion of the word ghetto from an online site of topoynms. This word originated from the Latin word for throw, or "jacere," also the etymology of "project", "inject", "jet", and "adjective."
"Ghetto" originally meant "foundry." "Venetian getto" is the word for a foundry for artillery. As the site of such a foundry, a Venetian island was named "Getto." Jews were forced to live there because of persecution, and that's how "Ghetto" became the word for cramped quarters.
OK, Kaleh, while we're on the Jewish theme, how about Jerusalem artichoke, or Jerusalem cricket? How about all those towns named, "Salem?" How about porto, or just plain port wine? And "meander" comes from a river of that appelation.
cantaloupe named after the Pope's summer residence in Cantalupo.
bikini after the Bikini Atoll in the Marshall Islands
And, here is one of my favorites:
Brobdingnag: from Brobdingnag, a country in Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, where everything was enormous. It's the adjective of choice when more prosaic modifiers such as huge, colossal, and mammoth just won't cut the verbal mustard.
[This message was edited by Kalleh on Sun Dec 14th, 2003 at 22:00.]
We talked here about such disparaging terms as french leave, french kiss, and chinese fire drill, and others.
If these are too obvious, there's spartan: simple and severe with no comfort. I wonder if the Athenians had other put-downs of their neighbors that have become more obscure English words.
Oh, Jerry, what a wonderfully informative link. Interestingly, Richard and I have been discussing the Holcaust on e-mail recently. He has sent me some excellent links; I had not known there was so much on the Web about the Holocaust.
laconic = brief, concise, terse. From the district of Laconia in the Peloponnese, whose capital was Sparta. The Spartans were known for their terse style of expression.
arcadian = simple and poetically rural. Again referring to a district in the Peloponnese, Arcadia, considered backward in antiquity (and still pretty backward today).
atticism = extreme elegance of speech. From the district of Attica where Athens is situated.
Of course the word 'toponym' itself is a kind of toponym in the general sense since it is derived from the word 'topos' = place and 'nym' > 'onoma' = name.
"Sandwich" is really an eponym, because it was named after the Earl of Sandwich, not the town. However, since the Earl was named after the town, I suppose it is a toponym once removed.
