• Agent641@lemmy.world
    48·
    1 month ago

    People naming things in Australia:

    • Townsville
    • Western Australia
    • Shark bay
    • Great Sandy Desert
    • Little Sandy Desert
    • Snowy Mountains

    But you also have wildcards:

    • Tasmania (not actually a mental illness)
    • Monkey Mia (There are no monkeys, and nobody named Mia)
    • Lake disappointment (contains no water)
    • Blue mountains (they are mostly green)
    • King Island (we don’t recognise its claim to the throne)
    • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldEnglish
      28·
      1 month ago

      Lake disappointment (contains no water)

      I don’t know, that sounds like a pretty accurate name for a lake without water

    • prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      23·
      1 month ago
      • Shark bay
      • Great Sandy Desert
      • Little Sandy Desert
      • Snowy Mountains

      Lol these sound like Super Mario Bros levels

    • mosspiglet@discuss.online
      10·
      1 month ago

      Lake disappointment (contains no water)

      Well, that would be very disappointing if your lake had no water. So I think they nailed that one.

    • MajorMajormajormajor@lemmy.ca
      10·
      1 month ago

      Didn’t you cunts also name a swimming pool after your prime minister who died swimming in the ocean?

      • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
        5·
        1 month ago

        The city of Townsville, yes (it is in fact a city)

      • Agent641@lemmy.world
        4·
        1 month ago

        TIL Powerpuff girls is set in a place called Townsville

    • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
      3·
      1 month ago

      Tbf the blue mountains are blue from the right distance in the right weather, like most temperate Australian mountains

  • Tamo240@programming.dev
    47·
    1 month ago

    Reminds me of

    Torpenhow Hill is a hill in Cumbria, England. Its name consists of the Old English ‘Tor’, the Welsh ‘Pen’, and the Danish ‘How’ - all of which translate to modern English as ‘Hill’. Therefore, Torpenhow Hill would translate as hill-hill-hill hill

  • Iunnrais@lemmy.world
    40·
    1 month ago

    My d&d game tends to work better when I just name things like “The Nightmare Wood” and “The Old Hills”. The simplicity somehow lands harder.

    • cassandrafatigue@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      17·
      1 month ago

      Sometimes name it after a person, or some shit that went down there, especially if its not someplace important. Like its not the nightmare town, there’s nothing particular about it. So it’s susanstown, and attempts to discover local lore would find stories about the ancient founder that have been embellished over the years.

      • Omgpwnies@lemmy.worldEnglish
        6·
        1 month ago

        or invert it… Nightmare Town is named because the founder had a nightmare the first night after establishing camp there, and nothing else. Susan’s Hamlet, though had some real fucked up shit happen, is actively haunted and is the birthplace of the BBEG.

    • Enkrod@feddit.org
      4·
      1 month ago

      My friends don’t know anything about my hometown, so I just name everything after old street names or old parts of town.

      • Cabbageford
      • Countsclearing
      • Blackstakes
      • Turnpike
      • Holyspring
      • Stepsstream
      • Canyard
      • Cattlestream Valley
      • On The Height
      • Cottageville
      • Stalkpond
      • Firecreek
      • Meadowsmill
      • Sticks
      • Bogbrook
      • Bogbridge
      • Kingsroad
      • Goldenworth

      It feels incredibly realistic, because it is.

  • Anomnomnomaly@lemmy.org
    31·
    1 month ago

    Reminds of the old story that I heard (unsure if it’s true or not) about Torpenhow Hill in the UK.

    Over centuries… various invaders and conquerors had come to that place and asked what it was called… First it was called Tor later on invaders added the word ‘Pen’ which was their word for Hill… later, more invaders came along and added the suffix ‘How’ which was their word for Hill… and finally… it was named in more modern English as Torpenhow Hill… which literally translates as Hill, Hill, Hill, Hill.

    I don;t know if that’s 100% true or not… but it’s an amusing little story and given the oddities of the English language… I’d like to think it was.

    Especially given there’s a species of bear out there that’s name is literally translated as Bear, Bear, Bear.

    • TheOakTree@lemmy.zip
      12·
      1 month ago

      From the Wikipedia page:

      A. D. Mills in his Dictionary of English Place-Names interprets the name as “Ridge of the hill with a rocky peak”, giving its etymology as Old English torr, Celtic *penn, and Old English hoh, each of which mean ‘hill’. Thus, the name Torpenhow Hill could be interpreted as ‘hill-hill-hill Hill’.

      I think it’s a hill?

    • 87Six@lemmy.zip
      6·
      1 month ago

      Guys I think that place might be on some elevated terrain

    • SaraTonin@lemmy.world
      3·
      1 month ago

      It’s kind of true. The last hill seems to be a modern invention, and Torpenhow Hill isn’t listed on any maps. There is a village there called Torpenhow, though, and that is Hillhillhill

  • Mac@mander.xyzEnglish
    25·
    1 month ago

    According to USPS, there are 32 towns in the US named Franklin. lol

      • Mac@mander.xyzEnglish
        10·
        1 month ago

        USPS says Franklin tops the list at 32, but Washington is popular as well woth 24.

        What’s your source?

          • Mac@mander.xyzEnglish
            8·
            1 month ago

            Oh, i see that. Interesting.
            Maybe differences in what’s being considered as a town? Who knows.

            • Pronell@lemmy.world
              11·
              1 month ago

              USPS has a way of combining smaller towns and suburbs to the largest nearby city. In practice this is very useful. You know your friend is near Nashville, say, and the zip codes do the heavy lifting.

              So I would posit that using USPS as a source in this case is not a great idea.

  • Siethron@lemmy.world
    24·
    1 month ago

    Fantasy world names: scadrial, Pallimustus, Vulcan, Tatoine

    Real planet names by locals: Dirt

    • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
      8·
      1 month ago

      It was called “Earth” because we needed to distinguish it from Sky and Water, which were totally different things.

  • lauha@lemmy.world
    23·
    1 month ago

    Istanbul is literally “to the city” or in a way just “the city”

    • tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip
      25·
      1 month ago

      Beijing is “northern capital”, Tokyo is “eastern capital”, and Kyoto is “capital capital”.

      • Hadriscus@jlai.lu
        28·
        1 month ago

        “capital_capital_final_thistime.jpg”

        (Karl Marx’s revision history)

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
      10·
      1 month ago

      The Nullarbor plain sounds like an Aboriginal word, but it’s just Latin and means “No trees” because there are no trees on it.

    • tmyakal@infosec.pub
      6·
      1 month ago

      Schenectady is “the place beyond the pines” because there was a big old pine barren between it and the next settlement over.

  • mech@feddit.org
    20·
    1 month ago

    Alaskan settlers wanted to call their new town Ptarmigan cause there were plenty of those birds around.
    But they didn’t know how to spell it, so they called it Chicken.

    • VeganCheesecake@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      10·
      1 month ago

      However, this is likely apocryphal, since it was popularized in the 1940s, almost 50 years after the town was founded. The most likely origin is from nearby Chicken Creek, as noted by Josiah Edward Spurr in 1896, “The creek is so named from the size of the gold, which is about that of chicken feed (corn).”

  • XM34@feddit.orgEnglish
    18·
    1 month ago

    Half the smaller villages in southern Germany are named “Ried” which comes from reed and roughly means “swampy place”. The other half uses some variation of the suffix “-höfen” which just means “this place consists of farms” 😂

  • MouseKeyboard@ttrpg.network
    18·
    1 month ago

    Fun fact: Celts were originally central European, but the British Isles and Brittany were the only places Celtic culture survived the Romans.

      • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
        41·
        1 month ago

        Some Celts drowned when doggerland became dogger island then dogger bank as the glaciers retreated. The sea flooding all the land must have been a surprise for them, no high land was high enough

        • MouseKeyboard@ttrpg.network
          4·
          1 month ago

          That was a few thousand years before Celts were around.

          Edit: It was also pretty slow; it was a couple of hundred miles across and took three thousand years to disappear, so it’s on the order of a few miles in a lifetime.

          • psud@aussie.zoneEnglish
            1·
            27 days ago

            I thought the Celts walked to the British Isles while they were connected to Europe. Guess I need to improve my British prehistory

  • poweruser@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
    16·
    1 month ago

    In my group if the GM can’t pronounce the name in one try in a way that makes it clear to us how to spell it the players with rename it something more like “Bonertown” or just “Dave”

  • AItoothbrush@lemmy.zipEnglish
    12·
    1 month ago

    Fun fact in hungary there are no two towns with the same name. Or at least thats what everyone seems to say and to be fair i havent found a single pair yet so im pretty sure its true. Quite a neat thing actually, if you tell the name of even a small town to someone, they should be able to find it. And because hungarian has its unique characters and structures its quite likely that its the only place on earth named that.

  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    1 month ago

    Naming my main character “Alexander” and every time I visit a city I tell the DM to refer to it as “Alexandria” going forward.