City council thinks what we're all thinking: 'Comcast is terrible – and NOT welcome here' New England's second-largest city has hit out against a proposed deal that would take place should Comcast's acquisition of Time Warner Cable go through. The city council of Worcester has voted not to approve the transfer of its cable television and broadband services from Charter Communications to Comcast as part of an agreed …
The weird part is how the master was completely dwarfed by its former colony (California alone has more about 3/4 of the GDP of the entire UK). Also if the English names bother you can go further west to the Mississippi and get your fill of French names or go southwest for lots of San and Santa.
Wow why you shouldn't post first thing in the morning on El Reg. My post would have been fine if I hadn't gone jingoistic asshole nuclear. As I am sure can rightfully be pointed out the UK does kick the US's butt in most things if you go per capita. Having shit tons of people for a developed country is our main claim to fame.
I live in a town that shares its name with at least 40 other towns in the US, all in different states. Google it and you'll likely get the one in New York first (unless Google happens to detect you're here that is), us second, and then the other 38 further down. It's not at all unusual a phenomenon in the US.
This would be like the state of New York named after "New York City, New Jersey".
Even if that were the case, it'd be considered child's play in the Midwest. For a while I attended (and taught at) Miami University, which of course is in Ohio (and for which Miami, Florida was probably named1). Miami University is located in Oxford (Ohio). I had a joint seminar with students from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, in Indiana, Pennsylvania (Jimmy Stewart's home town), and not to be confused with the far-flung (but not that far) campuses of Indiana University of, um, Indiana.2
1There is some dispute. Miami University, of course, is in turn named for the Myaamia, well-known for defeating the US in war, for which they received a treaty that was promptly abrogated, removal, and a university namesake.
2Pennsylvania also has a California University of Pennsylvania, but that never causes confusion.
I live in a town that shares its name with at least 40 other towns in the US, all in different states.
I live in a town that shares its name with another town in the same state. Different counties, fortunately.
Of course, I live in a state that's nearly two states, connected by a rather long bridge.
Outside of Vermont, which has a couple of French names (such as Montpelier), New England place names are a nice mix of UK and native American. In Maine, there's Portsmouth and Bangor, and Wiscasset and the Kennebunk River, for example. In the Dorchester Lower Mills neighborhood of Boston (Massachusetts) where I grew up, the river a couple of blocks away is the Neponset.
And here's to the Worcester (MA) City Council, for representing the concerns of its constituents, rather than the money of a corporate monster.
"Just goes to show that the Brits that came over were wholly unimaginative when it comes to naming stuff...." Yeah, not at all like those wildly inventive American souls who renamed Vickery Creek in Gerogia as Big Creek.... They were in good company - there appear to be at least seven other Big Creeks in the States.
I admit, I never saw a city named after an existing one that had any similarity to the "original". The ones labeled "New Something" seem ludicrous after they've been around a century or so.
But what alternatives? Naming after a person, but most names are pretty common. Naming after natural features also produces repeats as well.
If there were people already living there before the current population took over, you can borrow their names for things. I live in an area full of musical sounding Native American names, like Kennesaw, Allatoona, Nantahala, Oconee, and so on.
Which would probably sound to the natives like "New York", lol...
Practically everything in the UK is named for its location or what it is, it's just that the language changed so it's not as obvious anymore.
Cambridge - bridge over the Cam.
Brentford - see above.
Anything ending "chester" - Roman town. Worcester - concatenation of Weogara, the local tribe, and chester.
Durham - modern form of Dunholm; Dun = hill, Holm = island or prominence in sea or river. Durham is built on a hill surrounded on 3 sides by a loop in the river.
The ending "ton" means town. Boston, Brighton, Luton, Southampton.
TL:DR - we've been using naming linked to local features for two thousand years and more. Let it be.
"But what alternatives? Naming after a person, but most names are pretty common. Naming after natural features also produces repeats as well."
You can still find some strange names if you look. For example, there's a part of southeastern Virginia (now part of the city of Virginia Beach) called Witchduck. Sounds funny at first, but Virginia was one of the first British colonies...and the witch hunt attitude was not limited to Salem, Massachusetts.
But the one that always gets me (and one of the most famous when it comes to weird names) is Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
I suspect there will always be debate on both sides of the Atlantic when it comes to pronunciation. The best way to note it is that British English is more traditional but rather inconsistent whereas American English is generally more structured but as result things change.
I came to realize this when I had to pause for a moment to realize what was being described in a "gaol" and why I didn't recognize the pronunciations of words like Cheswick and Worcestershire, among other things (I describe it best as a lot of contraction, so much that it can confuse Americans).
"Group of rent-seekers who can't fix the roads want to run everything else too"
Of course local bureaucrats want to reject Comcast, they want to own and control the infrastructure in their fiefdom as municipal broadband. It's called rent-seeking. Pity the author has never heard of it.
Utah's Utopia muni-broadband project now sucks $13m a year out of 11 boroughs in Utah and had to be bailed out by private equity - who know a thing or two about rent-seeking themselves.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/municipal-broadband-is-no-utopia-1403220660
Yes, damn Comcast to hell - it is a truly horrible company. I hope it goes the way of dodo, and soon. But the imaginary paradise of taxpayers funding broadband is a fantasy.
Comcast is atrocious. I admin a bank of servers that are or a Comcast connection. I thought my ISP was bad until I started trying to do SSH over Comcast's network. I've never before in my life seen a SSH connection randomly freeze and/or drop so often. How it manages video traffic is beyond me.
This is somewhat symbolic, if the city manager just signs. But, cities don't have to. It's unusual, but cities have before refused to "rubber stamp" the renewal with a cable company. That cable company's then gone -- someone else gets to move in and use that cable infrastructure, or (occasionally) the city takes it over and runs a system themselves.
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