Holy Toledo, Holy Mackerel, Holy Smoke and Holy Cow

The Roman Catholic Primate Cathedral of Saint Mary of Toledo
(Catedral Primada Santa María de Toledo)

I have heard "Holy Toledo" used as an exclamation of surprise, as in "Holy Toledo, have you seen the price of that stock today?" On the old Batman television show, Robin was rather fond of using 'Holy' sayings during the show. It is a rather old-fashioned expression but its origin is much older.

The expression does refer to Toledo, Spain (not Toledo, Ohio, USA) which became one of the great centers of Christian culture after its liberation from the Moors in 1085. It was the city where Christianity got its first hold in Spain and is often called the Holy City of Toledo in literature.

I'm not sure how relevant it is to the origin, but I also read that Toledo steel was used in medieval swords and was renowned for its quality, and some of those Holy Toldeo swords were used to fight the Infidels.

But there are odd other usages of the expression that are less than religious. For example, in show business, "Holy Week" (the week leading up to Easter) was once considered the worst week at the box office and a Hollywood joke was that any week in Toledo, Ohio was a "Holy Week."

The American city of Toledo was anything but "holy" and in the 1920s and 30s it a sanctuary for gangsters. They seemed to have made a deal with the police that if the police would leave them alone, they would leave Toledo alone. To gangsters, this sanctuary was known as "Holy Toledo."

There is a larger group of "Holy ____!" expressions in English, such as "Holy cow!", "Holy mackerel!" or "Holy smoke!" all of which are used as exclamations of surprise.

"Holy Mackeral" seems to go back to the early 1800s and might have been a euphemism for Holy Mary. It has been suggested that "Mackerel" was a nickname for Catholics because they ate the fish on Fridays or that the practice of selling mackerel only on Sundays in the seventeenth century (its quality deteriorates rapidly) made it be known as a "holy" fish.

From the Dictionary of American Slang (1960):

"Holy Buckets!" Equiv. to "Holy cats!" or "Holy Mike!" both being euphemisms for "Holy Christ!". This term is considered to be very popular among teenagers, and most teens claim it is definitely a very popular phrase. It is also the common oath and popular exclamation put into the mouths of teenagers by many screenwriters, and is universally heard on radio, television, and in the movies. It was first popularized by the "Corliss Archer" series of short stories, television programs, and movies, which attempted to show the humorous, homey side of teenage life.

Incense burner

As far as the use of "Holy smoke!" according to the OED, Sir John Beaumont in 1627 writes: “Who lift to God for us the holy smoke / Of fervent prayers”. The idea being of a burnt sacrifice or incense is a metaphor for the carrying of one's prayers up to heaven.

The phrase "Holy cow!" and other similar expressions can be not only an exclamation of surprise but also a minced oath or euphemism for an actual expletive. (Not that you won't hear "Holy shit" and other literal expletives too.) As a way to avoid using obscene or indecent language, it probably alluded to the holiness of cows in Hinduism and other religious traditions. 

It was popular with baseball players going back to the early 1900s and was associated with several American baseball broadcasters. Growing up in the NY-metro area as a NY Yankees fan, I always associated it with Yankees shortstop and announcer Phil Rizzuto. He used the expression in a variety of poetic contexts. When the Yankees honored him following his retirement, the ceremony included a real cow with a halo prop on its head.

Naming Cities and Towns

If you look up the origin of "city," you find that it comes from the early 13th century. In medieval usage, it was a cathedral town, but originally it referred to "any settlement," regardless of size.

The distinction of town and city seems to occur in the 14th century. In English, a city ranked above a town which ranked above a smaller borough.

The word city goes back to Latin civitatem originally meaning "citizenship, the condition or rights of a citizen. But the Latin word for "city" was urbs, which is where we get the adjective "urban."

There are too many names of cities and towns to name and explain, but here are some common naming conventions used in English, particularly in America.

The obvious conventio is to name a new town after an older one. In the U.S., we have Rome, NY; Moscow, IN; Berlin and Vienna, VA. This was sometimes a homage to where the early settlers had come from, but also a way to add distinction to a new place.

Settlers to new places who wanted to harken back to their old world often added "New" in front of their beloved city. New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, etc.

Adding a suffix such as town, ton, burgh, city, ville, land, or polis on the end of a noun (name or otherwise) gives us Smithville, Beaverton, Irvington, Indianapolis, Roseland etc.

Other suffixes that are not only used for place names are also used. Ford, fort, field, plains, view, burgh, side, grove, wood, and way give us Frankfort, Springfield, Pompton Plains, Plainview, Cedar Grove, Maplewood etc.

We also name places often for a founder or famous person: (Lord) Fairfax, (John Foster) Dulles, San Francisco (Saint Francis) etc.

There are also conventions in other languages. For example, the suffix -au, -aue (related to rivers or water), is used in German for settlements at rivers and creeks, such as Passau.

The suffix -burg (meaning borough) is seen in Hamburg, Luxembourg, Regensburg, Salzburg (also with the Ancient Roman reference to salt).

The suffix -berg ("mountain") is attached to Heidelberg, Nürnberg (Nuremberg), Königsberg ("king's mountain", now Kaliningrad).

The -furt means a "ford", such as with Erfurt and Frankfurt.

You must be careful in your naming though. Syracuse, New York was named for the classical city in Sicily that was founded as a Corinthian colony in the 8th century B.C.E.. But it is likely that it comes from a pre-Hellenic word, perhaps the Phoenician serah  meaning “to feel ill,” in reference to its location near a swamp.

The city of Bayonne, New Jersey comes from bayonet, a type of dagger (usually fitted to a firearm) from the French baionnette. Bayonne, a city in Gascony, is supposedly where they first were made.

American Indian Place Names

Many places throughout the United States of America take their names from the languages of the indigenous Native American/American Indian tribes that first lived there. Settlements, geographic features, and later towns often took the Indian name - or more often, an Anglicized or misspelled version of it.

In my own home state of New Jersey, there are many places that take names from the Delaware, Lenape and other tribal names that were recorded.

Some places just sound strange enough that you would guess they were not English.

Ho-Ho-Kus, pronounced ho-HO-kus, is a borough located in Bergen County first settled in 1698. The meaning behind the town name is unclear. Origin stories vary but on the borough's own website, the most accepted origin is that Ho-Ho-Kus was a contraction of Mehokhokus or Mah-Ho-Ho-Kus, a native Delaware Indian term meaning “the Red Cedar,” as many older native terms beginning in “me” or “mah” lost their first syllables over time. The word is also a native term for running water, is similar to the word “hoccus” meaning fox and sounds similar to “Chihohokies,” the name of a native tribe whose chief lived in the area.

A few other examples:

Cinnaminson: Derived from the Lenni-Lenape word “senamensing” meaning “sweet water.”
Moonachie: Legend is that Moonachie was named after Chief Monaghie, a member of the Iroquois who inhabited the local cedar forests.

Hackensack: Derived from Lenni-Lenape word “Achsinnigeu-haki” meaning “stony ground.”

Paramus: The Lenape language word for the area, Peremessing, meant that it had an abundant population of wild turkey, was anglicized to become the word "Paramus"

Metuchen: Named for the Raritan Indian Chief, Matouchin, who lived in the area in the late 17th century.

German Cities

Looking at the suffixes used in naming cities can tell you something about the language and the geographical or topographical setting of that city.

One example I came across recently deals with the names of German cities. Of course, all of these have come over to America in the naming of cities by early German immigrants.

For example, cities with the suffix -dorf or -torf  which mean "village" and was used for small towns. Of course, after hundreds of years, that village may have become a city, such as Düsseldorf.

Düsseldorf is the capital city of the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia and center of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region. Düsseldorf is an international business and financial center and renowned for its fashion and trade fairs. This "village" has a population of 592,393 (2011) and an area of 83.78 sq miles (217 km²). Doesn't sound like a village to you? Well, imagine it back when it was founded - in 1288.

Copper-engraving of a view of Düsseldorf by Matthäus Merian.
Published in "Topographia Germaniae" edition: "Topographia Westphaliae" in 1647.

Here are some other German suffixes associated with cities:

with the suffix -furt ("ford"). Examples: Erfurt, Frankfurt.

with the suffix -brücken or -brück ("bridge"). Examples: Saarbrücken, Osnabrück, Innsbruck.

with the suffix -hausen ("house"). Examples: Mülhausen (Mulhouse), Mühlhausen, Schaffhausen.

with the suffix -feld ("field"). Examples: Bielefeld, Mansfeld.

with the suffix -werth, -wörth, or -ort ("holm"). Example: Kaiserswerth, Donauwörth, Ruhrort

with the suffix -roth or -rath, -rode, -reuth, -rade ("clearing"). Example: Roth, Wernigerode, Overath. It can also be used as the prefix -Rade: Radebeul, Radevormwald.

Algiers and Algeria

Algeria, officially the People's Democratic Republic of Algeria, is a country in the Maghreb region of North Africa. Its capital and most populous city is Algiers.

The North African country of Algeria is named for the city of Algiers which was the city chosen by the French as its capital when they colonized it in 1830. Adding "Algiers" to the Latinate "country" suffix -ia gave the modern city its name. The city name ii Arabic translates literally as "the islands" and is a reference to four islands formerly off the coast that have been joined to the mainland since 1525.

Al-Jazā’ir is itself a truncated form of the city's older name, Jazā’ir Banī Mazghannā, meaning "The Islands of the Sons of Mazghanna." That name was used by early medieval geographers. The city was built in 960 on the ruins of the ancient Roman city Icosium.

A resident of Algiers was known as an "Algerine" in the mid-17th century and that name was synonymous with "pirate" in England and the United States in early 1800s.

Algiers is located on a bay of the Mediterranean Sea and is still an important port. Algiers today is a large city with a metropolitan population of over 3 million. While downtown Algiers looks modern, the capital is struggling to keep up with rapid growth and standards of living for most of its population is very poor.

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.

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"

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