Names are not just labels; they carry stories, power, and cultural memory. In this excerpt from his book, “Names of New York,” Joshua Jelly-Schapiro invites us to reconsider how the names we encounter daily affect our perceptions and connections to the places we inhabit.
If language is consciousness and humans are a “place-loving species,” then place-names—toponyms—may mold a larger piece of our minds than we think.
Place-names have the power not merely to locate experience, but to shape it: not merely to label the locales to which they refer but also “in some mysterious and beautiful way become part of [them]” as the writer Henry Porter put it. Portals through which to access the past, place-names are also a means to reexamine, especially in times of ire and tumult, what’s possible. And nowhere is this more true than in a great city—a place, Tuan wrote, that “can be seen as a construction of words as much as stone.” Cities are monuments to civilization, and its opposite. They’re condensers of experience and creators of encounter. They’re nothing if not generators of tales.