Urban, Suburban and of Cities

Let's look at the origins of five words associated with cities and towns.

The Greater Tokyo Area is the largest metropolitan area in the world

We start with urban meaning "characteristic of city life," which goes back to the 1600s but really came into usage in the early 1800s. It comes from the Latin urbanus "of or pertaining to a city or city life," and as a noun, "city dweller."

The word urbane came to be be associated with the manners of a person (especially a man) being suave, courteous, and refined in a way associated with city dwellers in contrast to those from rural areas.

A metropolis is a very large city or urban area which is a significant economic, political and cultural center for a country or region, and an important hub for regional or international connections and communications.

The word comes from Greek and means the "mother city" of a larger colony. In the ancient sense, it was a city which sent out settlers.

Later it came to mean more generally a city regarded as a center of a specified activity, or a large, important city in a nation.

Some of the ancient metropolises have survived until today and so are among the world's oldest continuously inhabited cities.

It combines the Greek word mḗtēr meaning "mother" and pólis meaning "city"/"town." Greek colonies of antiquity used the term to refer to their original cities with which they generally retained political-cultural connections.

The word was used in post-classical Latin for the chief city of a province, the seat of the government and, in particular, ecclesiastically for the seat of a metropolitan bishop.

Today the word has come to refer to a metropolitan area, a set of adjacent and interconnected cities clustered around a major urban center. In this sense metropolitan usually means "spanning the whole metropolis," as in "metropolitan administration" or "metropolitan life."

On a darker note, the word necropolis meant a large cemetery of an ancient or modern city from Late Latin, meaning literally "city of the dead" which goes back to the Greek necro (death) and polis again.

The word citadel goes back to the late 1500s and always meant a "fortress commanding a city." Its roots are in the French citadelle, Italian cittadella, which is a dimuative form of the older Italian cittade "city."

The word suburb probably seems like a modern term but it goes back to the mid-14th century and means a "residential area outside a town or city." The first recorded usage of the term in English, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was made by John Wycliffe in 1380, where the form subarbis was used.

Its origin is from the Old French suburbe, from Latin suburbium  ("an outlying part of a city") from sub "below, near" and urbs for "city." The Old English word was actually underburg.

It's interesting that in earlier usage, suburbs of places like 17th century London meant something negative and was associated with an inferior lifestyle. A "suburban sinner" was slang for a "loose woman" or prostitute."

Suburbs first emerged on a large scale in the 19th and 20th centuries as a result of improved rail and road transport, which led to an increase in commuting. They tended to grow around cities that had an abundance of adjacent flat land. Any suburban area is referred to as a suburb, while suburban areas on the whole are referred to as the suburbs or suburbia, with the demonym for a suburb-dweller being suburbanite. The even more modern colloquial shortening gives us burb and the burbs.

A more modern city-related word is barrio which appears around 1841 meaning a "ward of a Spanish or Spanish-speaking city." In that way, a barrio was a district, much like a suburb.
The word has earlier roots in the Arabic barriya  meaning "open country" from barr meaning "outside" of the city.  In modern American English usage, it generally means a "Spanish-speaking district in a city" with an early (1939) reference being to the Sanish Harlem area in New York City.

Agent Orange

Agent Orange is an American punk rock band formed in Orange County, California in 1979. The band is one of the first to mix punk rock with surf music. They first gained attention for their song "Bloodstains," released on their debut 7" EP in 1979.

A demo of the song "Bloodstains" was given to Rodney Bingenheimer, a DJ at Pasadena radio station KROQ-FM. The song soon became one of his show's biggest hits.

Agent Orange is also considered to be the originator of "skate rock" after their music was used in the Vision Skateboard video Skate Visions that crowned them "King of the Skater Bands." That video spawned many imitators and is the best-selling skateboard music video of all time.

By way of an email from James Levesque, a founding member of Agent Orange, comes this origin story.

A number of punk bands on the West Coast such as Black Flag, Redd Kross, and China White used colors in their band names. In 1979, the horrors of the defoliant known as Agent Orange used in the war in Vietnam was still in the back pages of the newspaper. Levesque claims the bands interest in spying and being that they were one of the first punk bands in Orange County, CA was the catalyst for the name, though they were also aware of the political nature of the name.

The power trio's original lineup was Mike Palm on guitar and vocals, Steve Soto on bass, and Scott Miller on drums. Soto played on the original "Bl

Soto left the band to form The Adolescents and James Levesque was added on bass. The group recorded the Living in Darkness LP on Posh Boy Records in November 1981. "Bloodstains" was rerecorded and that version of the song later appeared in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 4

The band has had a number of lineup changes over the years and is still playing shows. They had a Brazilian tour in 2012.

As of this writing, the current lineup is Mike Palm: Vocals/Guitar; Bruce Taylor: Bass Guitar; Dusty Watson: Drums.

Sample some tracks: http://www.myspace.com/agentorange
Official site: http://www.agentorange.net

Bayonet and Bayonne

World War II soldier with rifle & bayonet

The bayonet is a word known back to 1610. Originally a type of dagger it was later afapted as a steel stabbing weapon fitted to the muzzle of a firearm.

It comes from the French baionnette  said to be from Bayonne, a city in Gascony, France where supposedly they were first made. It may also have entered the language as a diminutive of the Old French bayon  meaning a "crossbow bolt."

The city name is from the Latin baia "bay" and probably the Basque words meaning "good" and ibai "river" - good bay. The place served as a kind of link between the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea and by the 13th century, the city was an important port.

The New Jersey city of Bayonne is a peninsula that is situated between Newark Bay to the west, the Kill van Kull to the south and New York Bay to the east. The city name is probably from from Bayonne, France, from which Huguenots settled for a year before the founding of New Amsterdam.

Angora Wool

Angora rabbit
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/EnglishAngoraRabbit.jpg

Angora wool refers to the downy coat produced by the Angora rabbit.

Angora wool (AKA Angora fiber) is distinct from mohair, which comes from the Angora goat. It is sometimes confused with cashmere, which comes from the cashmere goat.

This wool is known for its silky softness, thin fibers, and what knitters refer to as a halo (fluffiness). It is warmer and lighter than wool due to the hollow core of the angora fiber.

This type of wool gets its name from Angora, a city in central Turkey which gave its name to the goat (1745 in English), and to its silk-like wool, and to a cat whose fur resembles it (1771 in English). The city's name is from the Greek word for "anchor, bend"

Arkansas and Kansas

Arkansas (AR-kən-saw) is a state located in the Southern region of the United States. It has a diverse geography which ranges from the mountainous regions of the Ozarks and the Ouachita Mountains, which make up the U.S. Interior Highlands, to the eastern lowlands along the Mississippi River and the Arkansas Delta.

Arkansas is the 29th most extensive and the 32nd most populous of the 50 United States. The capital and most populous city is Little Rock, located in the central portion of the state.

The Territory of Arkansas was admitted to the Union as the 25th state on June 15, 1836.

As you might guess, the name “Arkansas” derives from the same root as the name for the state of Kansas.

The Kansa tribe of Native Americans are closely associated with the Sioux tribes of the Great Plains. The word “Arkansas” itself is a French pronunciation (“Arcansas”) of a Quapaw (a related “Kaw” tribe) word, akakaze, meaning “land of downriver people” or the Sioux word akakaze meaning “people of the south wind”. The "s" was added by the French to make a plural.

The pronunciation of Arkansas was made official by an act of the state legislature in 1881, after a dispute between two U.S. Senators from Arkansas. One wanted to pronounce the name ar-KAN-zəs (r -kansas) and the other wanted AR-kən-saw.

In 2007, the state legislature passed a non-binding resolution declaring the possessive form of the state's name to be Arkansas's, which has been followed increasingly by the state government.

Kansas is a U.S. state located in the Midwestern United States and is named after the Kansas River which flows through it, which in turn was named after the Kansa Native American tribe, which inhabited the area.

The tribe's name (natively kką:ze) is often said to mean "people of the wind" or "people of the south wind," although this was probably not the term's original meaning.

For thousands of years what is now Kansas was home to numerous and diverse Native American tribes. Kansas was first settled by European Americans in the 1830s.

Missouri and Arkansas sent settlers into Kansas all along its eastern border. These settlers attempted to sway votes in favor of slavery, but a secondary settlement were abolitionists from Massachusetts and other Free-Staters, who attempted to stop the spread of slavery from neighboring Missouri.

Kansas was admitted to the United States as a slave-free state on January 29, 1861, making it the 34th state to enter the Union.

Today, Kansas is one of the most productive agricultural states, producing high yields of wheat, sorghum and sunflowers. Kansas is the 15th most extensive and the 33rd most populous of the 50 United States.

Residents of Kansas are called "Kansans."

Bialy and Bagel

A bialy is a roll that is similar to a bagel usually with onion flakes sprinkled on it.

Bialy is a Yiddish word and a short form of bialystoker kuchen, from Białystok, a city in Poland.

This small roll was a traditional dish in Polish Ashkenazi cuisine but has become more generally popular.

A traditional bialy has a diameter of up to 15 cm (6 inches) and is a chewy yeast roll similar to a bagel. But, unlike a bagel which is boiled before baking, a bialy is simply baked. It doesn't have a hole in the middle, but simply a depression which, before baking, is filled with diced onions and other ingredients, including garlic, poppy seeds, or bread crumbs.

Białystok, Poland literally means "white river," from Polish biały "white" + stok "river" because the Bialy River flows through the region.

According to Wikipedia, contrary to common legend, the bagel was not created in the shape of a stirrup to commemorate the victory of Poland's King Jan III Sobieski over the Ottoman Turks in the Battle of Vienna in 1683. It was actually invented much earlier in Kraków, Poland, as a competitor to the obwarzanek, a lean bread of wheat flour designed for Lent.

In the 16th and first half of the 17th centuries, the bajgiel became a staple of the Polish national diet,and a staple of the Slavic diet generally.

That the name originated from beugal - an old spelling of Bügel, meaning bail/bow or bale. It is thought that it may stem from the shape of traditionally handmade bagels not being perfectly circular but rather slightly stirrup-shaped.

Variants of the word beugal are used in Yiddish and Austrian German to refer to a somewhat similar form of sweet filled pastry. The Mohnbeugel is made with poppy seeds and the Nussbeugel is made with with ground nuts.

According to the Merriam-Webster's dictionary, 'bagel' derives from the transliteration of the Yiddish 'beygl', which came from the Middle High German 'böugel' or ring, which itself came from 'bouc' (ring) in Old High German, similar to the Old English 'bēag' '(ring), and 'būgan' (to bend or bow).

Similarly another etymology in the Webster's New World College Dictionary says that the Middle High German form was derived from the Austrian German 'beugel', a kind of croissant, and was similar to the German 'bügel', a stirrup or ring.

No matter what the origin, both are delicious.

Nome, Alaska

Nome gold pan

The city of Nome, Alaska has a curious and unclear origin.

Nome's founder, Jafet Lindeberg, may have given it that name because of a Nome Valley near his childhood home in Kvænangen, Norway. (In Norwegian, Nomedalen)

Some say that Nome received its name by a mistake. A British cartographer allegedly copied an unclear annotation on a nautical chart made by a Naval officer while on a voyage up the Bering Strait. The officer had written "? Name" next to the unnamed cape. The mapmaker misread the annotation as "C. Nome", or Cape Nome, and used that name on his own chart. Cape Nome made the map and the nearby city took its name from the cape.

This actually did cause some confusion and in 1899, some local miners and merchants voted to change the name from Nome to Anvil City to avoid confusion with Cape Nome which was 12 miles (19 km) south, and the Nome River, the mouth of which is four miles (6 km) south of Nome. But the United States Post Office in Nome refused to accept the change. Fearing a move of the post office to Nome City, a mining camp on the Nome River, the merchants unhappily agreed to change the name of Anvil City back to Nome.

Another story is that a settler asked a native to the area the name of the place and recieved the reply "no-me" meaning “I don’t know” and the settler accepted his comprehension of that answer as the name place.

http://www.nomealaska.org

Rhyme or Reason

Back in 1589, Edmund Spenser had been an admired poet by the rich and famous. His pastoral poems called The Shepheardes Calender in 1579 was a great success at court.

But poets did not make a living selling books, but by having rich patrons. Running short on money, Spenser took a position as a secretary to Lord Grey, the new Deputy to Ireland.



At 28-year, Edmund went to Ireland, where Grey crushed an Irish rebellion against the English, seized lands and gave Spenser about 3,000 acres, with hills, streams, and a castle to live on. Sweet deal.

Spenser worked for Grey for ten years and worked on a new epic poem.

Fellow poet and well known adventurer Sir Walter Raleigh lived nearby on his 12,000-acre estate and in 1589, Raleigh visited Spenser, who showed him his first three parts of his new epic, The Faerie Queene.

Raleigh thought that Spenser should present it personally to Queen Elizabeth. They traveled to England together that fall, and Spenser registered the poem for publication with a dedications to "the most mightie and magnificent empress Elizabeth."

Elizabeth heard him read his poem aloud and she did love it. He was hot in the circles of society again and hoped to receive enough patronage to stay in England.

Elizabeth suggested that Spenser be paid £100 but her chief advisor, Lord Burghley, who wasn't high on poetry or Spenser, objected. The story is that Elizabeth told him to pay the poet "what is reason."

Burghley didn't pay him at all.

After a few months, Spenser sent Elizabeth this short verse:

I was promised on a time
To have a reason for my rhyme;
From that time unto this season,
I received nor rhyme nor reason.

Spenser got his payment, and we got the phrase "rhyme or reason." Today it means "without purpose, order, or reason" as in "The statistics were so disorganized, that the conclusions were without rhyme or reason."

• Spenser, Fairie Queene (free audiobook), Librivox.
• The Faerie Queene (free online edition), Luminarium.
• Edmund Spenser: A Life
• Edmund Spenser: The Complete Poetical Works (for the Kindle)