One of the things I like best about Lexington is the name. I love the way the syllables roll off my tongue, and haven’t adopted the way locals shorten it to Lex or the trendier Lextown. There’s nothing like a good name.
Kentucky has an abundance of strange and interesting place names. Some remind me that I am in the South: Cobbler's Knob, Salt Lick, Turkey Foot, Stamping Ground, Cowcreek, Paw Paw, and Do Stop. Is that Do Stop as in “Do stop by and see us, y’hear”? I think it is. Other names defy all explanation: Krypton, Rightangle, Big Windy, Goforth, Hell’s Halfacre, Hi Hat, Tyewhoppety. I’ve heard New Jersey called “the armpit of New York”, but only Kentucky has a place named Shoulderblade.
Do people in Nada, Kentucky have inferiority complexes? What about those in Nonesuch? I wonder if those in Oddville live up to its name? It could be worse, though. They could hail from Broad Bottom.
Headline news this week told of a London woman who died after a snake-handling episode in her local church. I shook my head, imagining the restrained English passing poisonous snakes around over their tea and biscuits. Something didn’t jibe. I looked back at the article and realized they were talking about London, Kentucky. Many place names in Kentucky have a foreign ring. Without leaving the state, I could visit London, Paris, Baghdad, Cairo, Mexico, Lebanon, Egypt, Canada, Warsaw, and Moscow. There’s even a Versailles, but don’t dare say it the French way. That’s Ver-SAILS, thank you very much.
Some pairs of names made me look twice as I flipped through a state map booklet. There’s a Ford, Kentucky and a Chevrolet, Kentucky. Edward R. Murrow might be interested to know that there is a Goodnight and a Goodluck. I wonder why there’s a Democrat, Kentucky but not a Republican. Ernie Fletcher, the lame duck governor, is probably wondering, too.
With so many interesting places to go, I could travel for years and never leave the state. My entomologist husband may want to visit Bug, Beetle, and Butterfly sometime. I suppose if we ever get homesick, we can visit California, Kentucky. It’s about ninety miles north of us.
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