Names and Nicknames of Places & Things
Names and Nicknames of Places & Things

Edited by Laurence Urdang.

Published by G.K. Hall & Co., 1985.

This is a 6.5" by 9.5" clothbound book running to 327 pages including the geographic and subject index, plus a very brief foreword.

The title leaves out the word "dictionary;" what the book is is a dictionary of names and nicknames of places and things, with entries ranging in length from a few words to about a page, describing things or places arranged by their nicknames or other informal names. The author acknowledges the book's incompleteness and cultural bias, which unfortunately seems a little extreme.

For an idea of what's here, the first fifteen entries in the "M" sequence are titled:

• M & S
  
• MacDowell Colony
  
• Macy's
  
• Madison Avenue
  
• Madison Square Garden
  
• Maelstrom, the
  
• Mae West
  
• Mafeking
  
• Maghreb
  
• Magic Valley
  
• Magnificent Mile, the
  
• Magnolia City
  
• Magnolia State, the
  
• magpie houses
  
• Maida Vale
  

Strawberry Fields
A Salvation Army orphanage in Liverpool, in the Northwest of England, immortalized in the Beatles song of the same name, which they first recorded in 1967.

Wigan
A town near Manchester, England. Situated in a coal-mining area, Wigan is associated in the minds of the British with the ordinary man-in-the-street, a typically unthinking person representative of the unthinking masses. Music-hall comedians are wont to refer to performances at "Wigan Pier," and that apocryphal place is retained in the title of the book, The Road to Wigan Pier, by George Orwell.