Topical Guide 240
Mark Dorset
Places, Fictional: Chacallit, New York
Name, What’s in a
Names, Pronunciation of
Names and Naming: Place-Names
MY GRANDMOTHER, Lorna Huber, was born in Chacallit, New York, fifty miles or so northwest of Albany, in the valley of the Whatsit River, a tributary of the Mohawk. The name of the town has a curious etymology. The first English settlers arrived around 1680, some fifty years after William Oughtred developed the first calculating instrument that could be called a slide rule. These settlers knew the Mohawk name for the place, which meant, loosely, “place where many fur-bearing animals can be taken but the land is really too steeply sloped to allow one to make a proper camp.” However, since the settlers couldn’t pronounce the Mohawk name correctly and were, in the English manner, disinclined to learn to do so, when they were asked where they hailed from they made a bit of comic business out of struggling to pronounce the name, delivering three or four mispronunciations, and then shrugging and saying, “Oh, What-y’-may-call-it.”
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 1
Of Framley Parsonage I need only further say, that as I wrote it I became more closely acquainted than ever with the new shire which I had added to the English counties. I had it all in my mind,—its roads and railroads, its towns and parishes, its members of Parliament, and the different hunts which rode over it. I knew all the great lords and their castles, the squires and their parks, the rectors and their churches. This was the fourth novel of which I had placed the scene in Barsetshire, and as I wrote it I made a map of the dear county. Throughout these stories there has been no name given to a fictitious site which does not represent to me a spot of which I know all the accessories, as though I had lived and wandered there.
Technology, Outmoded: Slide Rule
See also:
Name, What’s in a TG 38, TG 43; TG 96
Names, Pronunciation of TG 44
Names and Naming: Place-Names TG 54
Gadgets, Electronic TG 83; TG 84
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