The Hooverville Hexagon: Grousing, the International Sport

 

We complain about things. You can, too. Our first complaint comes from the Isle of Wight and involves hazards to shipping.

 

Liberty of the Seas

by Bluebottle

Bluebottle tells Royal Caribbean where to get off – and it's not on his commute route.

 

This gurt big monstrosity is the Liberty of the Seas. Owned by Royal Caribbean, a cruise ship company that loves making each of their ships slightly larger than the one before so they can get the publicity for being the largest cruise ship in the world. Liberty of the Seas was the largest cruise ship in the world 2007-2009, overtaking sister ship Freedom of the Seas (2006) before losing that title to Oasis of the Seas (2009), with that title subsequently held by Harmony of the Seas, Symphony of the Seas, Wonder of the Seas. This week it is held by Icon of the Seas.

 Tourists like seeing cruise ships for some reason, but anyone who has regularly commuted across the Solent knows that seeing a gurt big thing like this in front has only one meaning; your crossing has instantly got half an hour longer as you’re stuck behind the thing.

 

And now the Editor drones on about endonyms….er, what?

 

On Top of Yr Wyrddfa

 

I don’t know about you, but it makes my toes curl when I hear TV and radio presenters use endonyms for places that have perfectly good exonyms.

Somebody on Twitter

 

I won't attribute that quote because I don't just disagree with it. I believe that its utterance in this form is a classic - and unfortunate - way to out yourself as someone who longs for the return of an empire.

 

Endonyms: what local people call their place. Exonym: what somebody else calls it.

 

The examples he and his enthusiastic friends proceed to list are telling: Kyiv and Türkiye. They're especially worried about the trauma caused to English children who eat something their mums take out of the freezer called 'Chicken Kiev'. I'm not sure what that is, but its name appears to be terribly important.

 

Apparently it doesn't bother the posters if Turkish children are tired of people using the world's most common internet language keep making 'gobble, gobble' jokes at them. It's the fault of old Europeans, anyway: turkeys don't come from Turkey. They run around the woods in Pennsylvania. Or are raised on farms in North Carolina.

 

Oh, and Mount Snowden. (No, turkeys don't live on Mt Snowden. It's the exonym thing.) That's because its name has been officially changed to Yr Wyrddfa. Pronounced 'Er WERTH-vah', 'th' as in 'the'. TIL that we've been pronouncing Gwynedd wrong in Pennsylvania for, probably, about 300 years. Our bad. It should be like 'Paltrow'.

 

The Welsh and the Irish amuse me mightily as a linguist: I sometimes feel like their spelling is revenge on the English for hundreds of years of having to live next door to them. I don't blame them, even as I am repeatedly forced to check my spelling. I used to be a translator and let me tell you: no languages have harder dictionaries to use than Celtic languages. Learning another alphabet is child's play compared to having to figure out what letter a word really starts with when you're staring at it in an oblique case.

 

 So, yes, you may be personally inconvenienced by the choice of modern people to choose endonyms in order to show solidarity. But as a way to be friendly and polite, it's cheap at the price.

 

Just be glad nobody's demanding you learn the local language before you go on your next package holiday.

 

More Structures to Admire?

by DG

As Stephen Sondheim wrote, 'All things are beautiful, Mother; all trees, all towers, beautiful…'

 

Today at the Movies:

Flapjacks (1920)

by Bud Fisher

Break out the popcorn.

 

TTFN,

 Dmitri Gheorgheni, Editor