November 24, 2003

*Ask Jen

Jeff asks, "Were there ever any alternative names for US States that got rejected?"

The thing is, most of the state names were already in use before becoming...states. Being a midwestern kinda girl, I'm used to native American names for my states. I mean, there was talk of naming Minnesota after Lewis and Clark, but calling a state "Meriwether" is pretty gay even for Minnesota. So they went with the native American word for "we'll say 10,000 lakes because it sounds good and you won't count them anyway." Of course, Iowa is the native American word for "death from boredom."

I suppose I should throw you one fact about US names. Despite popular belief, Plymouth, Massachusetts was not so named because the Pilgrims set sail from Plymouth, England. It had been named before that. Prince Charles replaced the "barbarous" native American name of Accomack with a nice English name about six years before the Pilgrims set sail.

Simon wants to know, "If a tree falls in the forest, and no-one here's it, has it really fallen or is it part of a global environmental conspiracy?"

Trees are stupid. I'm glad that one is dead. Who cares how or why it happened. The important thing is that it won't be falling on any poor, innocent loggers in the future.

Do you have a question for me? You can e-mail it. If I know the answer, I'll answer it. If I don't, I might make something up.

Posted by Jennifer at November 24, 2003 06:57 PM

Comments

I think California was originally going to be called Collagen.

Posted by: Guinness at November 24, 2003 08:21 PM

Thanks for the answer. I think the main thing is if you take all the blogs in the world and all the computers they're written on, we've saved a lot of loggers from a lot of problems.

Posted by: Simon at November 24, 2003 11:57 PM


Jew