American Place Names

This was going to be on Jonathan Raban, but I'll keep him in reserve.

I've always loved place names. The shipping forecast, train station announcements, little snatches of songs - "I'm going to Wichita" and so on.

WH Auden talks of names as being proto-poetry, and it's an insight worth tracking down and reading. He's talking about peoples' names, but I think it applies equally to place names. And thanks to Jonathan Raban for reminding me of the great names of America.

(And I'm glad it was Jonathan Raban, because he belongs on my list of writers whom I admire greatly but don't mention very often because I don't know how to pronounce their name. Primo Levi is another. This all started when I first discovered L'Etranger, aged 16, and went to school bubbling with enthusiasm for existentialism and one AlberT CamuS. Andrew Sullivan, an annoying little twot, fully two years younger than me - a dead ringer in looks and views to the twelve year old William Hague - put me in my place, not just on how to pronounce Albert but also threw in a pretty impressive deconstruction of the absurdist position - well, at least he did before I hit him. He is now apparently the "foremost political blogger in the States" - and seemingly still a twat - but I digress.)

I like British names - Potter Heigham; Bracklesham Bay; Newport Pagnell; Cader Idris; Fife four, Forfar five. But I truly love American place names. The frontier names. The ones (as Raban points out) that sound like they come from Pilgrim's Progress. The ones that describe what they see. The ones that are ice-box not refrigerator.

Damnation Peak; Mount Despair; Lucky Canyon; Starvation Point; Big Rock; Little Rock; Thunder Gulch; Golgotha Butte; Sand Ridge; Poverty Ridge; Sage; Dead Canyon; Bend; Lonetree Pine; Long Beach.

What's your favourite place name?