The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1867-08-10
A Commodity OF Bad Names.

From The independent.
One of the very few good laws which grew
out of the reign of the Sans Culottes in
France was a republican edict forbidding any
child to be christened by a name not found
either in the calendar or in history. The law
is still in force, and it has saved many
Frenchman from the misfortune of being COM
PEELED to drag through his weary pilgrimage
under the disadvantages of a ridiculous cogno-
men, such as many of our own countrymen
bear. Our State Legislatures are very indul-
gent it is true, to such unfortunates, and
readily grant them the privilege of changing
their patronymics; but generally the damage
which can be rendered by bad name is all
done before the sufferer is old enough to petit
tion for a remedy. In this country we suffer
chronically and nationally from a commodity
of bad names. Our Revolutionary Fathers
ought to have incorporated provision into
the Constitution that no historical nor Euro
pean name should ever be given to any place
within the limits of the Union. That would
have saved us from the terrible confusion of
names which now afflicts us.
When we receive letter, as often happens,
dated at Cuba, Denmark, Lima, Naples,
Peru, Halifax, Rome, Athens, Jerusalem,
without the State and county being given, we
are utterly at a loss to know where it comes
from. 1t may come from the Old World, or
it may come from the New. There are dozens
of places of the same name all over the country,
and unless the State and county are given no
clue can be had to the locality. We are not
an inventive people, at least as far as names
are concerned; and if the use of Old World
names were interdicted, we should have to
f.l 4l,Axv do IN,
mating the islands in the Mississippi, as the
Philadelphians do with their streets, and we
New Workers do with our avenues. That
would be dreadfully prosaic, to be sure; and
in speaking of the place of our childhood, we
should have to apOstrophize it as "Dear Old
Number Forty -one," and so one.
In naming our States, by some piece OF
miraculous good fortune, we CHANGED upon
some very good names, only two of them
being importations from the Old World,
and those being qualified by the prefix Of
New. To call the Empire State of the
Union after a fourth-rate city in England is
as great an absurdity in nomenclature as
could possibly be committed, and the whole
region abounding, as it does, in sonorous, in
digenous names which would have beftted it
SO well. The city which we absurdly call
| New York ought to have been called Man
haitian, and the State should have been called
ontario. 1t is not too late to make the
change now. But what we need most of
all is national name. Now that we have
become a nation, and there is no longer any
distinction of North and South. we want a
common name by which we can be DESIGNATED,
But how we are ever geing to obtain so de-
sirable an acquisition is more than we can con
ceive. We are Americans; and SO are onr
neighbors of Mexico and Canada. and 80 ara
the Peruvians and Brazilians. Il was once
proposed by society of grave gentlemen,
who organized themselves into an association
national name for us, that we should call our
selves Apallaohians, after the chain of noun
tains that forms our spinal bone, as it were;