The Name Game

On Wednesday we took a trip out from Knowledge Towers and went to the new Ripley's Believe It Or Not! exhibition, which I assumed would give me facts by the handful. Regrettably, though it was very entertaining, and built nicely from rooms full of tat to a magic walkway at the end, I learnt only one thing - that Yankee, a term meaning American, basically, actually meant English originally. It was a mispronounciation of 'English', courtesy of Native Americans. They got Yankee from English - no wonder they never broke through the language barrier. That and all the killing. Anyway, an interesting place, but the biggest shock of the evening was at the till - £20 each. Sticking with our original theme of names, and our additional one of rip-offs, we move on to cornershops. Martin's and McColl's, famous overpriced newsagents, always appeared to be owned by the same company, with their alluring blue and white signs, but little did I know that they're in fact owned by the same man - who else but Martin McColl.

Moving on to an ever so slightly more famous name, I decided to look into the meaning behind the very name of our capital city, London. While most places in the city have a clear history of where their name comes from, the amazing thing is that nobody knows where London got its name from. Various people who know about this sort of thing have suggested that the word has its roots in a dizzying range of languages, including Welsh, Belgian, Indo-European and Italian. It appears the most likely options are that it means 'fort on the river' or 'wide river' - both of which are fairly accurate, if slightly underwhelming depictions of the capital.

Of course, London is a word which conjures a variety of images - not all of them favourable, but it's not often associated with boredom. Belgium, on the other hand, is practically a byword for long, yawning spells of tedium, as it is seen by the wider world as not that interesting, to put it mildly. Try telling that to the residents of Brussels, who are burgled more frequently (and by that, I mean their houses are broken into it, not their bodies) than any other capital city in Europe - just pipping London to the post.

To conclude this name-based riff, we revert to the common denominator of nominal facts - the real names of celebrities. Everyone knows that Harry Webb and Reg Dwight are known by slightly more glamorous names nowadays, but a repeat of Who Do You Think You Are? (my new favourite show, having stumbled upon Ainsley Harriott having his soul torn in half by the revelation that his great-grandpa was a slave trader) let me know that cockney sparrah Babs Windsor was born Barbara Ann Deeks. It also informed her, and the audience, that her great-grandparents hailed from Ireland (which she was excited about) and Suffolk (which was met with a look bordering on disgust). As empty-handed backpackers in Belgium will tell you, never judge a place on preconceptions...