(Very) plain 7-bit ASCII in US placenames

From: Anto'nio Martins-Tuva'lkin (antonio@tuvalkin.web.pt)
Date: Sun Oct 16 2005 - 05:16:42 CST

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    This is a forwarded message:

    ===8<==============Original message text===============
    Eugene Ipavec <eipavec@e...> wrote:

    >Valentin Poposki wrote:
    >
    >> the flag of the City of St.Marys in
    >> Ohio.
    >
    > The town was apparently hard-hit in the Great
    > Midwestern Apostrophe Shortage of 1893 :)

    Not the city's fault. A US federal body in charge of standardizing
    the spelling of geographic names--not sure if it was the Post Office
    Department or the Board on Geographic Names--long ago banned
    apostrophes and diacritical markings, so that St. Mary's became St.
    Marys and Prince George's County, Maryland, became Prince Georges,
    which sounds like it should be named after a French prince instead of
    an English-Hanoverian one. The same body also dictated the spelling
    of names ending in -burgh to be changed to -burg and -borough to -
    boro. A valiant few counties and municipalities had the nerve to
    fight back, so that we now have St. Mary's City in Maryland,
    Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, and Marlborough in Massachusetts, but the
    majority of the places affected by these edicts simply complied, St.
    Marys, Ohio, evidently being one of them.

    Joe McMillan
    Alexandria, VA, USA

    ===8<===========End of original message text===========

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