After our conversation about funny street names, listeners chime in with more: In Tallahassee, Florida, there’s a Frankie Lane and a Lois Lane; in Batesville, Arkansas, you can meet up at the intersection of Gwinn and Barrett; Boulder Creek...
Sometimes people naming streets seem to have a little too much fun: In Casco, Maine, there’s a road called Uptha, as in Uptha Road. In Hemet, California, there’s a Haviture Way, and along Porters Lake, Nova Scotia, three connecting...
Kinbank is a new database that illustrates the global diversity of family terms. English, for example, specifies sibling relationships with just one of two terms: sister or brother. But most other languages have even more specific terms. In...
A Michigan biologist wonders how the Carp River in his home state got its name, considering that the river was so named long before that particular fish was introduced. I turns out, just as in the rest of the Western Hemisphere, Europeans who...
A tweet from Jeremy London suggests that if we named people the way they did a thousand years ago, we’d hear names like Darren the Depressed or Isaac the Uninsured. What would your name be? This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of...
For a fantastic read about the history of taxonomy and the ways we use language to try to divide up and impose order on the world, check out Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science (Bookshop|Amazon) by science writer Carol Kaesuk Yoon...