The Future Names Of London

Here in Canada, there are a lot of places named after other places. London, Ontario, is probably the most famous, but also within a short drive of my home, you can visit Paris, Stratford, New Hamburg, Vienna, Cambridge, and Delhi. I’ve always found these weird. First, from a standpoint of culture: a borrowed name means that the identity of your place is tangled up in some other place. And secondly, from a standpoint of convenience: you’re forever saying, “I’m from London…no, not that London.”

But of course, that’s looking at it from my perspective in a country where many people live in settlements named for other, much older and more famous settlements elsewhere. It occurred to me recently to wonder at the mentality of those people who gave these sites their names in the first place. For each of those places, somebody thought it was a good idea to give it an already-used, already-famous name. I can’t really imagine what would make a person think that’s a good idea.

First of all, what inspired the names? Some British settler came across a small encampment in the middle of a forest and said, “You know what this reminds me of? London!” I suppose you could say that the name is more of an inspiration: they’re not saying it’s like London, but that it aspires to be like London. But still, that’s kind of setting it up for disappointment. Surely they’d give it a more attainable goal. I don't know, Sheffield? 

It seems a little odd today to call a city of half-a-million by the name of one of Europe’s largest cities, but how did folks in the early years call this collection of houses, “London,” with a straight face? As an early English settler in southern Ontario, you know London as this huge city, and now you’re using the name to refer to a little hamlet. “I will journey to London on the morrow. By Jove, I would that there existed some manor of hand-gesture to indicate that one uses a name of such ridiculousness with a sense of reluctance, as if it were in quotes.”

Secondly, why do they reuse the name exactly, without any changes? I mean, I can understand calling it “New” something. You know, don't confuse us with York; this is New York. Then you’re paying tribute while giving it individuality, and you’re explicitly saying it’s a new version of that old place. The Americans have plenty of “New” places, but Canada doesn’t have many, we prefer just reusing names. So in addition to not understanding why that old explorer decided to associate the rudimentary settlement with the grandest city of his homeland, I also don’t understand why he felt no need to distinguish it from its namesake. 

I guess there's a parallel with people's names: we often name people with the same name as a parent. But then we invented the word, “junior” to avoid confusion. Reusing place names is like naming a kid after his father but insisting that you not call him junior. Who would do that? 

“I’m Frank, and this is my son, Frank.”

“Ah! Frank Junior.”

“No! Frank!”

Then, years later, the kid introduces himself, "I'm Frank, no, not that Frank."

But here's another way of looking at this: To better get inside the head of those early place-namers, let’s say we Canadians were exploring space. We’re colonizing a new planet, and we’ve just established a settlement. It’s only three habitation pods and a greenhouse, but we then say, “And we’ll call it, Toronto.” Okay, that’s a bad example, Canadians wouldn’t feel right naming things after ourselves — we’d probably just name that settlement, “London.” 

So let’s say it’s the Americans establishing a space colony, and they have to come up with a name. They wouldn’t use New York, since that’s already a borrowed name. But would they call their new settlement something like, “Los Angeles” or, “Chicago?” I can’t imagine that, since those names have — for both good and bad — a lot of emotional connotations. They wouldn't feel right calling a place “Chicago” when it doesn’t have L trains, disappointing baseball teams and ketchup-less hot dogs. They’d either fall back on generic American names (Columbia, Freedom, Liberty) or name it after a person. Which brings up the question: how could you journey across the Atlantic and half of North America — in the eighteenth century — without anyone in your party doing something that deserved getting a small town named after them?

"So I'm from London...No, not that London. How about you? "

"I'm from Pickles The Ship's Cat. It's a long story."

I’m Gonna Mess Your Mind

Congratulations to Spain on winning the women’s World Cup. They now join Germany as the only countries to win both World Cups. Meanwhile everyone’s world has been turned upside-down by the jump in parity in women’s soccer, leading to plenty of upsets and Cinderella teams.

Here in Canada, we’re in mourning; we won gold at the Olympics - in our greatest soccer achievement ever - but followed that up with not getting out of the opening round here. If you’re not familiar with it, in men’s soccer, the Olympics are limited to under 23, but for women, there’s no limit, so it’s like smaller a World Cup. So you’d think it would be harder to advance in the Olympics, where you’re playing higher quality teams sooner. And yet, Canada has gone to the Olympic semi-finals three times in a row, but only made the World Cup semis once, back in 2003.

But for much of the world, the big news is the early exit for the two-time defending champion Americans. If you watch the men’s World Cup, you know that favoured teams having an embarrassing run and going home early is a regular occurrence. But now supporters of the U.S. Women are in existential panic.

Years ago, I noted that it was weird but refreshing to watch the fans of American men’s soccer, because it was one of the few places where the United States was regarded as just another country. What was especially weird was that American fans seemed to be okay with that. To be fair, we’re only talking about a subset of Americans, since the majority don’t really follow soccer even when the U.S. is involved, but there is a subculture within the U.S. that cares about its team, even on the men’s side, and it’s remarkable what an internationally-reasonable attitude they have.

All that’s happening right now is that the U.S. Women’s team is going to have to take on that same attitude. While watching the hype surrounding the Americans going for a Women’s World Cup three-peat, I realized that the truly unusual thing about the Men’s team fandom is that it’s one of the only places where you’ll see Americans being patriotic, but not buying into American Exceptionalism. They’re proud of their country, they support their team, but they don’t think their country is inherently better or apart from the others. The women’s team will have to adopt that attitude. In their case, they’re a great team, but just a team. So it’s a subtle change, but they’ll have to go from thinking of themselves as the Harlem Globetrotters to merely the New York Yankees.

Watching Americans watch their Women’s team, it’s been more like business as usual for Americans in international sports, with even well-meaning Americans seeing their team as above everything else. Take advertising, for instance. Even here in Canada, we’re subjected to ads for American brands that glorify the American women, oblivious to the fact that they’re our chief rivals, and thus, not really who we want to see celebrated in every commercial break. It’s reminiscent of that one American you see on lists of the dumbest things said on the internet, asking a British person if they celebrate the Fourth of July. 

Partly, this is because their Women’s team has been a boon for those looking for female role models. And finding role models for our kids is a universal thing, so they’re just assuming the whole world will join in on glorifying the stars of their team. It hasn’t occurred to them that if my daughter’s role model was just knocked out of the tournament by your daughter’s role model, then I won’t want to join in on the adulation.

And that brings us to the goodish news: you can look at this as another example of women’s soccer hitting the mainstream. When a sport starts out and creeps along in the margins of the sports world, there tends to be a communal feeling, like it’s all of us against the world, looking for acceptance of our sport. But once you’re in the mainstream, we can all think of it in competitive terms. This sport has finally made the big time, now that I hate your daughter’s role model.

Merry Mac’s

Where I grew up, the nearest store was a Mac's convenience store. Back then, they went by the name, "Mac's Milk," I suppose because in those days milk was the big draw for convenience stores. My dad would always call it, "Mac's the Milk," in reference to the song, Mack the Knife, famously recorded by Bobby Darrin in the 50's, but — and I didn't know this — written in 1928. Not the greatest pun, but, well, it's a dad joke. I wonder if I inherited that need to make misunderstood pop-cultural puns. (looks at blog post titles) Sigh.

Anyway, I — being a youngster — didn't understand the reference, and thus also referred to the store as "Mac's the Milk," thinking that was the actual name. My friends thought there was something wrong with me, since they also didn't get the joke, and of course, when you hear a young person saying something so nonsensical, you assume he's a little slow, not that he's the victim of a corny joke about music from a couple of decades back. And I should clarify that, in my childhood's memory, my dad 'always' said that. He probably did the joke like, twice, but in my early perception of time, it seemed like a lot.

My reason for going through this awkward, possibly deformed memory, is that the Mac's convenience store chain is mostly gone now, having been bought, and then rebranded out of existence. As the picture illustrates, they’ve all become Circle K. A brand that, fittingly, sounds like an old west cattle brand.

Of course, bygone brands are hardly news: I've already written about disappearing brands. But what's interesting is that brands disappear for different reasons. They might simply go out of business, or they might be bought out by a rival. But it gets a little more complicated when you find that the same company might operate in different places under different names. Perhaps they bought a local company and decided to operate with the name that locals already knew. For instance, the European food delivery firm Just Eat has bought some local services and used their names in those markets. So it goes by "Just Eat" in Europe, but it's known as "Skip The Dishes" in Canada, and "Menulog" in Australia & New Zealand. Yes, local branding is so important to them that they seriously made Katy Perry sing that jingle three times for the European, Canadian, and Australian & New Zealander markets.

(How much do I care about this blog? Enough to watch that commercial three times. Well, two-and-a-half.)

But in our globalized world, it often doesn't make sense to have different brands in different places anymore. After all, it's expensive to make specialized advertising, and people see advertising from different countries through the Internet, or international sports events, or movie product placements. And here in Canada, we're used to seeing our brands replaced by American ones, like Circle K. What's frustrating is that in this case, it's a Canadian company doing it. Quebec's Couche-Tard (or, "night owl") is a convenience store behemoth, owning lots of brands around the world, including Mac's. But Circle K is the most numerous, so when they decided to use one brand for all their English-language stores, they went with Circle K. I can understand the logic behind it, but it still feels like in Canada, even when we win, we lose.