Friday, June 14, 2013

Stink Onions!

This is an incredibly cool thing:

Chicago smells funny. 
It's the Atlas of True Names, and it takes the piss out of place names using the power of etymology. Did you know that "London" means "Unfordable River Town"? I did not. Suddenly, it seems much less posh...

You can order a map of the world, as well as higher-resolution maps of the USA, Canada, and the British Isles, with the rest of Europe coming soon.


Sadly, this appears to be a UK-based product as the prices are given in Pounds Sterling. This means you will probably pay out the nose for transatlantic shipping.

Still, it's very cool!



5 comments:

  1. Most place names are for what was there long long ago. Obviously Oxford was at one time the location of a shallow enough spot to ford the river with your oxen. Much less so in north americam and they often are butchered from the original language origin.
    But i like this a lot.

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  2. wow i really cant type today

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  3. I dispute that. London is the Romanised, then Saxonised name of what used to be 'Lughdinium' or 'the holdfast of Lugh'. Lugh being the Horned God. Later it became 'Londinium' I won't disagree about the translation of London's current name but it seems like many of the places on those maps take in only the direct translation of the names and not much of the history of where that name came from.

    I'm an absolute nut for etymology so I'll be passing on the maps myself, to my chagrin I'll admit, but they do have a bit of something to them.

    Side note; Leprechaun is the anglicised version of 'lugh-chromain' which means 'little stooping Lugh'. Not such a cute little guy in green when you realise it was created to insult the head of the pagan pantheon.

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  4. Wonderful! (Quite literally!)

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  5. I love this and I want it.

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