Distribution of Generic Watercourse Terms

Below are some interesting maps showing how generic terms for watercourses are distributed in the Northeastern United States from a 1955 paper by Wilbur Zelinsky.¹ The term river is universal throughout the examined area, so only terms applied to small- and mid-sized streams were examined.

The term creek was typically used in England only for coastal estuaries of which there are of course many along the Atlantic seaboard of America; however, it’s American usage as a generic term for fresh water streams occurs most commonly west of the Hudson River:

Zelinsky discusses the theory that because of the broader coastal plain in this area, coastal watercourses named as creeks actually flowed from much farther inland. The term was applied more generally as the population expanded to the interior.

The term brook is coincident with the New England cultural area and it’s expansion directly westward. It’s English meaning as a stream with a fast flow rate was more applicable to the hillier coastal topography.

The term run is dialectical to northern England and Scotland and may have become common in the Appalachian area because of the influx of Scottish and Irish immigrants.

Both branch and fork were used exclusively to describe tributaries in England, but were applied to general streams in America. Although the terms were used widely, no pattern can be discern from their application other than the fact that they are entirely absent from the earliest areas of settlement, indicating a later adoption.

The generic term stream is only common in the most northerly reaches (and most lately settled) areas of New England, and also very sporadically south to Virginia.

·

¹ Some Problems in the Distribution of Generic Terms in the Place-Names of the Northeastern United States by Wilbur Zelinsky. Annals of the Association of American Geographers, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Dec., 1955), pp. 319-349. back.

Old Burlington Mall

Off in a corner of a parking lot of the Executive Office Park in Burlington, Massachusetts there is a small waterfall where a little stream emerges out from under Mall Road and tumbles into what, for all intents and purposes, is a drainage ditch.¹ It’s a bit remarkable that in the otherwise dehumanizing surroundings of a typical suburban industrial park there remains this small remnant of relatively untouched landscape— such as it is.

My father talks about hunting in the area as a kid, of course long before the Burlington Mall and Route 128 were put in, when this area was what he thought of as the middle of nowhere. Burlington is currently a modestly sized suburb of Boston with a population of around 23,000, but back before it was tied into the national highway system, it hovered around 1000.

Looking at some old USGS maps of the area shows just how much things of changed. The Vine Brook has been completely covered by the mall itself - and emerges out on the other side of the Vine Brook Plaza - another bit of development named in typical fashion after the very thing it has helped destroy… The waterfall is part of the Long Meadow Brook—which has more or less maintained its original course, although straightened along the edge of the parking lot before passing back under the road where it eventually joins with the Vine Brook before merging with the Shawsheen River.

When 128 and the Mall were put in, a number of streets where reconfigured, including the location of the old South School at the junction of Blanchard Road and Lexington Street.

The only picture shows the old building in a verdant, rural setting—basically the antithesis of what is now there: the parking lot of the Sears Home and Garden Center.

¹ Here is a picture of the falls itself. The flow is unusually high here because of recent rains.

A file, viewable in Google Earth, showing the maps above laid out over the modern terrain is available here.

A map showing the precise location of the falls is here. In the satellite view, the arc of the brook can be easily made out even though it is obscured by vegetation.

A short video clip that captures some of the majesty of the falls is here.

Earliest References to “Ipswich”

These are the earliest written references to the city of Ipswich:

942 A.D.: Will of Theodred, Bishop of London. Sawyer 1529. See: Charta Anglosaxonicae, p. 293 line 9.

BISHOP ÐEODRED

In nomine domini nostri Ihusu Christi!

…

And ic an ðat lond at Waldringfeld Osgote mine sustres sune and min hage ðat ic binnin Gypeswich bouhte.

☩

975 A.D.: Coins minted in Ipswich bearing the image of Eadgar and the location of the mint.¹

front: ☩ EADGAR . REX . ANGLOR . (Eadgar, king of the English)
back: ☩ LIFINGE . MO . GIPSǷIC . (Lifinge, moneyer at Gipswic)

¹ Golding, C. The Coinage of Suffolk. 1868. p. 8.

☩

991 A.D.: The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Peterborough Manuscript (E).

Her wæs Gypeswic gehergod, ⁊ æfter þam swiðe raðe wæs Brihtnoð ealdorman ofslægen æt Mældune. ⁊ on þam geare man gerædde þet man geald ærest gafol Deniscan mannum for þam mycclan brogan þe hi worhtan be þam særiman; þet wæs ærest .x. þusend punda. Þæne ræd gerædde Siric arcebiscop.

Here Ipswich was raided, and very soon after that Ealdorman Byrhtnoth was killed at Maldon; and in that year it was first decided tax be paid to the Danish men because of the great terror which they wrought along the sea coast. That was at first 10 thousand pounds. Archbishop Sigeric decided on the decision.

An Etymology of “Ipswich”

The name of the town of Ipswich in Massachusetts—originally called Agawam—comes directly from the city of Ipswich in Suffolk England. While some second-order sources claim that the name was chosen because that is where many of its early citizens were from, there is no actual evidence of this.

The official records of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for August 5th, 1634 make no mention of that supposed fact, stating tersely:

It is ordered, that Aggawam shalbe called Ipswitch.¹

Then governor John Winthrop, who had sent his son to establish the town in 1633, noted in his journal entry for August 4th, 1634:

At the court, the new town at Agawam was named Ipswich, in acknowledgment of the great honor and kindness done to our people which took shipping there, etc.; and a day of thanksgiving appointed, a fortnight after, for the prosperous arrival of the others, etc.²

Ipswich is a truncated version of its original name, Gippeswick, though that spelling is a relatively modern standardization of a name that took many forms (as was usual for the period.) It was spelled alternatively as Gipewiz, Gepeswiz, or Gypeswiz in the Domesday Book commissioned by William the Conqueror and completed in 1086.^3,4

There are two main theories on the origin of Gippeswick, both of which ultimately derive from an Anglo-Saxon personal name.

Indirect Adoption

The first is that Gippeswick took its name from the River Gipping concatenated with the Anglo-Saxon (Old English) word wic, meaning dwelling-place or abode.⁵ Wic is derived from the Latin vicus, for village, which was borrowed as *wik by Proto-Germanic, the unattested precursor to Anglo-Saxon. When applied to a town name it generally meant a trading place or port, which is what Gippeswick had become soon after its founding in the early 7th century.⁶

River Gipping takes its name directly from the village of Gipping near its headwaters.⁷ Gipping or Gypping is a concatenation of Gyppa, an Anglo-Saxon personal name and the suffix -ingas, meaning “the people of”. Who this person “Gyppa” might have been is lost to history, but it was perhaps the name of a Anglo-Saxon clan leader, someone who established a colony as part of the initial wave of Northern Germanic immigration in the wake of Rome’s abandonment of Britannia in the 5th century.⁸ In any case, it was someone of enough import that his descendants or followers maintained an identity through the name. The area became know as the land of “Gyppa-ingas” - “followers of Gyppa”.⁹

Direct Adoption

The second is that Gippeswick took the name of this putative Gyppa directly. Gyppa-wick would be the trading center of a man named Gyppa.¹⁰ Gipping would have taken it’s name more indirectly from Gyppa at some later period. This process would actually follow the ideas of Dodgson who put forth the theory that place names ending in -ingas are associated with the colonization of areas more distant (both physically and temporally) from those of the initial immigration.¹¹

In either case, fifteen-hundred years later, a shadow of this man’s name remains as part of a town across an ocean in a land he could hardly have imagined.

While all etymologies see Ipswich ultimately deriving its name from the Gipping River, earlier ideas for the derivation differ:

E.g., geap, an Old English word meaning “to wander” ¹²; or from the Gaelic word caep, cip, congate with the Latin caput, or head, source. The Gipping being the head of the river Orwell ¹³.

Notes

¹ Records of the Governor and Company of the Massachusetts Bay in New England. August 5th, 1633.

² The Journal of John Winthrop, 1630-1649.

³ Electronic Edition of Domesday Book: Translation, Databases and Scholarly Commentary, 1086. UK Data Archive. 2007.

⁴ Domesday Book. UK National Archives. 2006.

⁵ Russo, Daniel G. Town origins and development in early England, c.400-950 A.D. 1998, p. 161.

⁶ Ibid, p. 142.

⁷ Laflin, S., Do -ingas place-names occur in pairs? English Place-Name Society Journal, 35 (2003), pp. 31–40.

⁸ Stenton, Frank M.; Parsons, Doris M. (ed.) Preparatory to Anglo-Saxon England: being the collected papers of Frank Merry Stenton. 1970.

⁹ Carver, M. O. H. The Age of Sutton Hoo: The Seventh Century in North-Western Europe. 1994, p. 54.

¹⁰ Mills, A. D. A Dictionary of British Place-Names. 2003.

¹¹ Dodgson, J. M. The Significance of the Distribution of the English Place-Name in-ingas,-inga in South-east England. 1966.

¹² Charnock, Richard S. Local Etymology: A Derivative Dictionary of Geographical Names. 1859.

¹³ White, Charles H.; Tymms, S. (ed.) The East Anglian; or, Notes and queries on subjects connected with the counties of Suffolk, Cambridge, Essex, and Norfolk, 1864.

Anton Chigurh’s Quarter

In Cormac McCarthy’s book (and in the Coen brother’s adaption of) “No Country for Old Men”, there is an infamous scene where the assassin, Anton Chigurh, subjects a gas-station owner to a trial where his life hangs in the outcome of a coin toss. The innocent owner is at first unaware of the purpose of Chigurh’s demand to “call it”, but the morbidity of the situation slowly starts to dawn on him. (I won’t repeat the entire oft-quoted exchange; you can read it here.)

“You know what date is on this coin?”
“No.”
“1958. It’s been traveling twenty-two years to get here. And now it’s here.

Is there any meaning to the date, 1958? At first it just seemed random, but it struck me that perhaps this is not the case. In 1965 the Coin Act changed the make-up of U.S. coins so that dimes, quarters and half-dollars were no longer 90% silver, but where instead cladded nickel and zinc. Gresham’s Law states that bad money quickly pushes good money out of circulation as people tend to horde the coins with the higher intrinsic value. This is exactly what happened in the U.S.; silver coins quickly began to disappear from circulation until by 1980, when the Hunt Brothers’ attempt to corner the silver market pushed the price of silver to $50/oz., it was rare to find one.

So what was Chigurh doing with a silver coin in his pocket in 1980? There’s really no hint, but I doubt McCarthy wasn’t aware of the oddity of a silver coin being in someone’s possession at that late date. My guess is that the enigmatic Chigurh is meant to have a collection of these coins in his pocket for just this purpose. He seems to know the date of the coin without even looking at it. It has a significance known to only him which compounds for the reader the mystery behind his dark convictions.

Dropkick Murphy’s at Bellows Farm

While the Dropkick Murphys are a fine group, I’ve always been more interested in the name of the band itself. Members have always told that they took the name from a supposed detox center, owned and operated by a former wrestler by the name of John “Dropkick” Murphy. The Boston Herald columnist Howie Carr has salted his columns with mentions of the place for years— generally in reference to the Kennedys—well before the existence of the band of the same name. E.g.:

“And how would you like to be Joe Kennedy? Here’s your uncle, looking more like an escapee from Dropkick Murphy’s every day, and he says he’s going to run again in 1994? ”

- Howie Carr. Boston Herald. October 28, 1991

So while the name of the place is fairly well-known (around Boston anyway) its actual existence has remained somewhat more legendary. Several places mention that its official name was “Bellows Farm” located in Acton, Massachusetts. There is now a road called “Bellows Farm Road” in Acton on or near the original property.

While I couldn’t find any specifics or pictures of the facility, several mentions of it show that this must be the place.

A Massachusetts court case from 1973 (2 years after the facility closed) mentions Murphy:

“This is a bill in equity under G. L. c. 231A, seeking a declaration whether certain amendments to the zoning by-law of the town of Acton (town) apply to a parcel of land (locus) owned by the plaintiffs Bellows Farms, Inc. and John E. Murphy and on which the plaintiff Donald P. O’Grady has contracted to build 402 apartment units. The defendants are the town, its building inspector and the members of its board of selectmen.”

BELLOWS FARMS, INC. & OTHERS vs. BUILDING INSPECTOR OF ACTON & OTHERS. April 4, 1973 - November 7, 1973.

This land is along the Nashoba Brook in Acton which is mentioned in an article on fishing in Massachusetts from the New York Times:

We visited a spot in Boston (Jamaica Pond); then he gave me an hour on Neshoba Brook (on a stretch open to the public and owned by Dropick Murphy, a former wrestler) where I caught two brook trout.

“Wood Field and Stream” New York Times. May 9, 1968.

Finally there is this small advertisement for the facility a year after it opened (the only one I could find anywhere)

$25 per week works out to be about $325 per week in 2009 dollars, which isn’t exactly cheap. Legends of the place being some last stop for end of the line winos might be a bit misplaced.

Dropkick Murphy was an actual wrestler. Here is small clip from back when The New York Times actually used to report on professional wrestling:

Metropole

“Kafkaesque” is perhaps our most overused eponymous adjective, but in the case of Hungarian writer Ferenc Karinthy’s brilliant Metropole, there is simply no more fitting term to employ. It’s amazing that this book, written in 1970, has only recently been translated into English for the first time.

Budai, a linguist on a trip to Helsinki for a conference, mistakenly lands in an unknown, crushingly-overcrowded city where people speak an utterly incomprehensible language. Signs, symbols, art, food, religion, all bare a resemblance to a vaguely pan-European culture, but the populous appears to be a mixture of races from all over the world. His frustrations slowly morph into panic then resignation as his inability to communicate drains away his assurance and dignity in the claustrophobic atmosphere amongst the indifferent, if not outright hostile multitudes.

Eventually he begins to wonder if everyone else around him is just as trapped as he is. It’s hard not to see the novel as an allegory of life in the Eastern Bloc. The original title of the book is “Epépé” which is one of the ever-shifting names Budai applies to the single person he manages to maintain the thinnest tendril of a relationship with. The fact that her name shifts seemingly unselfconsciously on Biadu’s part suggests his unknowing abidance at the cusp of some dreamworld. It’s perhaps telling that the Hungarian title focuses more on this one human relationship than the dehumanizing metropolis of the English translation. It hints at the ultimate hope of salvation which is perhaps the most un-Kafkaesque aspect of the entire book.

New Book from Magnus Mills in August

Magnus Mills the Booker Prize-nominated author who was famously a bus driver before his first book was published, is apparently still plying that trade. He has a rather innocuous commentary in The Independent which while typically clever and all, is more remarkable for its low-key announcement of his new book due to be published in August: The Maintenance of Headway.

The snippet from the book is classic Mills:

‘It’s a matter of procedure,’ I explained. ‘Strictly for the record. You don’t get sacked from this job unless you did what Thompson did.’
‘What did he do then?’
‘We never mention it.’

I can’t wait.

Boston Then and Now

The above is an early color photo of Boston taken from across the Charles River in Cambridge. It is part of the Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection hosted at the University of Indiana.

The above is the same location taken just last week. Things have changed quite a bit in the last 60 years. In the top photo, the tallest building on the left is the Suffolk County Courthouse; next to it is the Custom House Tower.

Auyuittuq: ‘The Land that Never Melts’ is Melting

The title of this entry comes from a quote in a CBC News article yesterday describing the on-going flooding problems in Auyuittuq National Park on Baffin Island.

Parks Canada officials say they have never seen anything like this before in Auyuittuq. “Auyuittuq means ‘land that never melts,’ but of course now it’s melting,” Pauline Scott, a spokeswoman for Parks Canada’s Nunavut field unit, told CBC News on Tuesday.

Auyuittuq is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and it has meant a lot to me since my travels there. Individual weather anomalies are of course impossible to tie to overall climate change, but it’s hard not to see this as part of a larger, more tragic trend.

The picture accompanying the article shows the Weasel River undermining the moraine field that holds back Crater Lake, which I’ve pointed out in the following map:

The referenced article also connected the flooding here with that which occurred this June in Pangnirtung which I had mentioned recently.