10 October 2012
Quote of the Day: Stephen Fry
From Stephen Fry's America:
"If ever there was a silly name for a town it is surely that of Maryland's elegant and graceful capital city Annapolis. I hope Queen Anne, after whom it was named, wasn't too hacked off about it. What would have been wrong with Anneville? Oh, it sounds like a blacksmith's iron. Of course. Incidentally, one of the minor but interesting linguistic differences that one meets along the way in America is that they say 'named for' where we would say 'named after'. So they might say Annapolis was named for Queen Anne and Baltimore, Maryland's biggest town, was named for the English peer Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who, as it happened, married one Anne Arundell, after whom, or for whom, Annapolis was orignally named Anne's Town before, in a fit of sycophancy, the city fathers dedicated it to the then young Princess Anne, later of course the last of the Stewart monarchs. One might say all that and then be left both out of breath and holding the loose end of a conversational thread."
"If ever there was a silly name for a town it is surely that of Maryland's elegant and graceful capital city Annapolis. I hope Queen Anne, after whom it was named, wasn't too hacked off about it. What would have been wrong with Anneville? Oh, it sounds like a blacksmith's iron. Of course. Incidentally, one of the minor but interesting linguistic differences that one meets along the way in America is that they say 'named for' where we would say 'named after'. So they might say Annapolis was named for Queen Anne and Baltimore, Maryland's biggest town, was named for the English peer Cecil Calvert, Lord Baltimore, who, as it happened, married one Anne Arundell, after whom, or for whom, Annapolis was orignally named Anne's Town before, in a fit of sycophancy, the city fathers dedicated it to the then young Princess Anne, later of course the last of the Stewart monarchs. One might say all that and then be left both out of breath and holding the loose end of a conversational thread."
Labels: Stephen Fry
# posted by mamurd @ 11:34 PM 
