Weird mnemonics for Englisch spelling & weird place names in the Catawba Valley
First, let me get this off my chest. Englisch is absurd and weird. I say that as a native Englisch-Sprecher who mostly lost his Southern Drawl for professional reasons but can still revert to it when appropriate (“Where ‘bouts over yonder?”). Take our weird spelling “rules” for instance. I mean I before E except after C? Seriously? It’s just not sufficient for our species! It’s not foreign or feisty enough, not weird enough. We should all be Deutsch sprechen — fair warning: this link is NSFW in two languages!
It might not always sound that pretty to American ears, but at least Deutsch is always spelled exactly like it sounds, Nouns are always capitalized, and it’s a “rich and affective” language — granted with some possible areas for improvement as Mark Twain suggested in 1880. And as Twain also noted, Deutsch really does have some “singularly and powerfully effective” words. Plus there’s lots of great stuff to read, including Franz Kafka and a psychotic “bible” from the mid-1920s that unfortunately still has relevance today.
The Germans do not seem to be afraid to repeat a word when it is the right one. They repeat it several times, if they choose. That is wise.
— Mark Twain, The Awful German Language (1880)
Second, we have some weird place names in the Catawba Valley of North Carolina that I want to document here, along with the stories about how they got their names — with your help of course! This initial list is primarily from the counties of Catawba and Lincoln. So this post is still very much a work in progress…
We should start with what is perhaps the weirdest name of all — Catawba Valley. It’s named after a river that runs through it, which was named after the Catawba people who now live just outside of the valley near Rock Hill, South Carolina. Their nation wasn’t recognized by the state of North Carolina— home of the “Catawba Valley”— until 1993. Think about that.
The picture at the top is an old cotton mill named Laboratory. Why? It was used during the Civil War as “one of at least five laboratories established by the Confederate States of America to manufacture drugs from indigenous plants.” And I’ve written previously about Vesuvius Furnace, which is an old iron furnace that smoked like Mount Vesuvius and was run with the help of slave labor. But have you ever heard of that “imaginary New England village” near “Hickory Corners” called Pumpkin Center — er, isn’t that Punkin Center? Chris? ☺
Then we have Cat Square: a “crossroads community” in northwest Lincoln County “named after unwanted cats and kittens were left there on several occasions.” It’s near Hog Hill where “early settlers branded their hogs and let them roam there until fall, when they were taken home to be fattened.” Hog Hill was also apparently the site of a popular local dance hall and opera house at one time, but today the area is known as the home of a weird kind of local Christmas parade in the “middle of nowhere.”
Thanks to Chris, David, Stephanie, Connie, Julie, and others for their help with the weird local place names. Und vielen Dank to my dear Freund Celery Blink for the Twain Referenzen!
“Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
— Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889)
Enjoy this content? Please Share! You might also like my eBook on my Familiengeschichte and Genealogie and Keener paths thru partisan divisions in Amerika — see local endorsements and press coverage.
Post Permalink: http://j.mp/WeirdGerman (case sensitive).
