 |
|
|
|
Neasden! … [ sfx: laughter choked back ]
Now I have no way of knowing if that had any effect on you at all, especially since this is (in spite of all the urban legends to the contrary) a one-way medium (and not only that, but in my case a delayed one too), but ...but if you were an English audience I could guarantee that most of you would be rolling around on the floor roaring with laughter at that witty little sally; and it’s not because of the way I tell ’em, nor because of the current plague of Nitrous Oxide use in the Untied Kingdom, but instead because the English are naturally so susceptible to the humour of names, particularly to the names of places. I don’t understand it fully,especially in the case of Neasden , because I've been there and its just a quite pleasant ...well to be honest a barely pleasant ...well to be brutally honest an extremely boring... North London suburb. Its a bit like saying “Irondequoit” to a Rochester audience and expecting to get a laugh.
It almost certainly won’t happen however I tell it.
I suppose I could try to make it funny [sings (sort of), and to the tune of Nat King Cole’s ‘Around the World’]
'Irondequoit I search for you.
I hurry on when hope is gone
To keep a ronde voit……'
Naaa does not work at all, does it?
Though actually, now I come to look at it, ‘Irondequoit’ is quite a fun word; so I will commit the cardinal sin of etymology---by the way did you know that there actually was a Cardinal Sin (of the Philippines I believe and not nearly such a deadly one as mine, though he is now dead himself which in no way makes my sin any less cardinal) Where was I? Oh! Yes! So I’ll make a pronouncement without checking for sources---it seems that the name Irondequoit is a potted history of the place. It’s fairly obvious that ‘Irondequoit’ was originally a name in some Algonkian language, probably a reference to the bay, the lake or some other geographical feature--or just possibly to the finger of the first European who pointed at it and asked a passing Iroquois or Seneca “What’s that”; or, as we descend through the orders of probability, to the parentage of the said European since that was the tenth time that day that the bloody twits had asked that short tempered Indian the same question. The spelling, of course, looks French and indeed the French were among the earliest Europeans to muscle-in here in recent times - so the name and its spelling presumably reflects that most ancient of human transactions “clear off this is my land now, oh by the way what’s the name of that bay or lake or finger or parent or whatever?”---only in French.
Time and ownership passed and now-a-days it’s pronounced in an American English way though it still has its French spelling so it was no doubt adopted by people reading it rather than hearing it which probably says a lot about that potted history.
Neasden…
Hmmm just checking.
Of course in the case of Neasden there IS a real reason for finding the name funny---It's originally from the Old English Néosdún which name means "nose hill" and having said that I wonder if there isn’t some race memory, something in our English Genes that responds to its ancient nasality.
Finally: as an Englishman, with all our native propensity for finding fun in names, I had a whale of a time with all the placenames placed in odd conjunctions by those Indian-annoying Europeans.
Massachusetts is obviously the funniest state from that point of view, but in up there in Upstate you have, for example, Bath (sorry Baaath) and Manchester, Newark and Brighton (though sadly I haven’t yet spotted a Neasden) in among the more exotic Napleses and the Romes and the Cubas which brings me to a final confession of what I hope is a merely venial sin---I’ve had a fantasy left over from the old days when we all wore berets and had Che posters on the wall, of getting onto a bus in Brighton and taking it over crying, in good revolutionary form, “Take this bus to Cuba!”, though nowadays I couldn’t do it because I probably would end up in Cuba, or at least Guantanamo ...I nearly said “Neasden!!”
Cheerio for now
from Richard Howland-Bolton.
|
 |
 |
<-- Go Back |
|
|
| Home | Essays | Notes | Gallery | Miscellany | Contact |
All contents including writing, cartooning, music, and photography unless otherwise specified are
copyright © 1965-2023 howlandbolton.com and Richard Howland-Bolton. All Rights Reserved.
All logos and trademarks on this site are property of their respective owners. | Web work* by 
*as distinct from Wetwork
  |
|
|
