Let's raise a glass to toponyms. And make that a glass of champagne (from the name of a former province in northern France) or Chianti (from a mountain range in central Italy), bourbon (a county in Kentucky), sherry (a town near the port of Cadiz in Spain), or port (the Portuguese city of Oporto).
Toponym refers to either a place name or (like each of the beverages hoisted above) a word coined in association with a place. In his book Toponymity, John Marciano offers "a playful and only occasionally pedantic look at the words that come from places and the peoples who live in them."
Marciano (also the author of Anonyponymous: The Forgotten People Behind Everyday Words) regales us with word stories. Some of them, he says, "document our innate human curiosity about a world beyond our own." Others (such as the etymology of barbarian and slave) "betray our xenophobia."
Test your familiarity with toponyms by taking this quiz: match the 12 words below with the names of the places where they originated. You'll find the answers on page two.
Words
(a) bohemian (b) dungarees (c) jeans (d) seltzer (e) ammonia (f) bunk (or bunkum) (g) tuxedo (h) daiquiri (i) bikini (j) spa (k) morgue (l) laconic
Places
- an oasis in the Libyan Desert (a place where camels relieved themselves while their masters prayed for good omens)
- one of a series of islands in the South Pacific where nuclear bombs were tested in the 1940s
- a former kingdom of the present-day Czech Republic
- a phonetic spelling of a county in western North Carolina
- a village in India, now a section of Mumbai
- the district around Sparta in ancient Greece
- a village in eastern Cuba
- a seaport in northern Italy
- a resort town in eastern Belgium
- a village near Weisbaden in Germany
- a building in Paris
- a village in Orange County, New York
Answers to the quiz are on page two.
