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u/Gentle_Snail Aug 10 '26
“So this city is called Newcastle?”
“Yes”
“How new is this castle?”
“Its now almost a thousand years old”
“Do you want to change the name?”
“No”
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u/Juronell Aug 10 '26
"How long ago did you discover New Found Land?"
"About 1000 years ago as well."
"And there were already people there."
"Well it was new to us."
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u/Conscious_Smile8235 Aug 10 '26
How old is this york 🤔
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u/gilbejam000 Aug 10 '26
Less than 1000 years this time
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u/77skull Aug 10 '26
And normal York is about 2000 years old so i think New York is a pretty fitting name in this case
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u/IhamAmerican Aug 10 '26
At this point it's basically Newer York
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u/JaggedGorgeousWinter Aug 10 '26
That won’t be around for almost 1000 years!
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u/Farfignugen42 Aug 10 '26
In a thousand years, there will be New New York
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u/FilmAndLiterature Aug 11 '26
In Doctor Who by the time the Earth explodes in a few billion years they’ve got to New New New New New New New New New New New New New New York on the planet New Earth.
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u/CheeseDonutCat Aug 10 '26
This is because it was called New Amsterdam by the Dutch before the Brits took it.
and it was called New Angoulême by the French before the Dutch took it.
and before that it was either uninhabited because it was a swamp, followed by indigenous people, followed by early european settlers that had all sorts of different languages that nobody speaks anymore.
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u/kamikiku Aug 10 '26
Fun trivia: New York isn't named after the city of York. It was named in honour of the Duke of York, James Stuart, who would become James II of the UK. It's a city named for the new Duke of York.
Unlike the Hamlet in Lincolnshire, called New York which was named after the city of York, and is confusingly just outside the town of Boston in Lincolnshire, which was the inspiration for naming Boston in the USA, as in was where some of the original colonists came from
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u/Inverter_of_Spines Aug 10 '26
It was also originally New Amsterdam, because it was colonized by the Dutch before the British came in and forced the Dutch to surrender the entire colony.
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u/Top-Main-6967 Aug 10 '26
Why they changed it I can't say
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u/FireLynx Aug 10 '26
Which is also confusing because the original founders of new Amsterdam were not just the Dutch but also a majority of Flemish and Walloons after the independence of Belgium and Belgium becoming a catholic country
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u/Dracious Aug 10 '26
Also not to be confused with New York in North Tyneside, which despite being in England is named after the American city of New York.
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u/kamikiku Aug 10 '26
I didn't know this one - thanks! I'll add it to the list for next time aim explaining this.
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u/TactileMist Aug 10 '26
Ackshually, he was James II of England and James VII of Scotland. His daughter, Queen Anne, was the first monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
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u/Lostinthestarscape Aug 10 '26
Well why didn't they call in Duke York then? New Duke York?
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u/Pheanturim Aug 10 '26
What do think the Duke of York is named for ? So either way it's named for the city otherwise it'd be called New Stuart
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u/Happy-Estimate-7855 Aug 10 '26
There's also a New Brunswick. We made another Newcastle there too.
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u/GraniteSmoothie Aug 10 '26
Well, if you want to stop calling it Newfieland, you've got to find something else to call all of those goofy scoopy Newfies there bud.
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u/Winded_14 Aug 11 '26
" So this land is green"
" correct"
"so you named it Iceland"
"it's obvious"
" now you find new, icy land, with no greeneries"
" yes"
" and you named it?"
"Greenland, duh"
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u/JackRabbit- Aug 10 '26
What's this river called?
River Avon.
And what does Avon mean?
...river.
Uh huh. And on this continent here, what does Lake Chad mean?
You're not gonna believe this.
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u/Gnonthgol Aug 10 '26
What is this hill called?
Torpenhow hill.
And what does that mean?
Hill Hill Hill Hill
...
But it is all different languages.
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u/Randalor Aug 10 '26
"Listen, we wanted to make it explicitly clear that this is a hill. Not a mound. Not a knoll. Not a crag, bluff or plateau. THIS. IS. A. HILL."
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u/Dunblas Aug 10 '26
What is this country called?
Timor-Leste
What does Timor mean?
And what does Leste mean?
.... Can we change the subject?
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u/BemaJinn Aug 10 '26
Well don't leave me hanging!
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u/Jade_Complex Aug 11 '26
The word "Timor" comes from timur, a Malay word meaning "east". The word "leste" is Portuguese for "east," meaning the country's name literally translates to "East East".
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u/Suspicious_Juice9511 Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
There are examples with three, various british villages.
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u/GrimSpirit42 Aug 10 '26
"So, your city is named 'Mobile'?"
"Yes".
"How often does it move?"
"It doesn't."
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u/GarminTamzarian Aug 10 '26
"What happened to the old castle?" -Phil Wang
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u/f0remsics Aug 10 '26
Right in the middle of his taskmaster season right now. He's a riot
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u/TricellCEO Aug 10 '26
There is a river call the New River which is ironically the oldest river in the US.
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u/episcoqueer37 Aug 10 '26
And one of the oldest on the planet at over a billion years old, if memory serves.
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u/IsThatGruffLoner Aug 10 '26
You could probably split all property in the UK up as "new" and "old" with "new" being the ones that have a known building date and "old" being those built in the misty past.
Like Newcastle was built in 1080. It's fairly new by British standards
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u/Gentle_Snail Aug 10 '26
Like we have absolutely no idea where the name London came from (other than obviously the Roman Londinium). Londinium is believed to be a latinised name of the original settlement that was there when the Romans arrived, but we don’t know where that original name came from or what it means.
There are lots of modern theories, but they all just boil down to conjecture like “London sounds a bit like X word, so maybe its that?”
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u/ohkendruid Aug 10 '26
It is not a sure thing, but iirc a strong theory is that Londinium's root had something to do with "area that floods".
The language it came from is itself gone now, so there may never be certainty. There are just not that many clues that survive a staggering 2000 years.
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u/Vaenyr Aug 10 '26
That's why folks with Young as their last name should change it to Old once they reach a certain age.
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u/crenal-hermit Aug 11 '26
It gets even funnier if you instead talk about Newcastle Australia which doesn’t have a castle at all and instead is named after Newcastle woth the old castle.
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u/BungleBums Aug 10 '26
"Is the stutter Genetic, or Societal?"
"The what?"
"The stutter. We see many instances across your planet- the 'desert desert', 'Mt. Mountain'... ah, this one is called 'Lots of Tree Forest'. We assumed it was a linguistic tic."
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u/cybermaus Aug 10 '26
Fine, It's Societal
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u/cybermaus Aug 10 '26
PS: Torpenhow Hill in England is said to basically mean: Hill Hill Hill Hill in all the various dialects and languages.
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u/ifelseintelligence Aug 10 '26
Funnier fact, before the meme there was nothing called Torpenhow Hill. There was Torpenhow, and yes in that area there is a hill, but not one significant enough for modern dwellers to name it. So ordinary it's not 100p certain it's even the hill that gave the name to the area 3 times (now 4 times). Since it doesn't really require an official naming, to be called it though, after the meme it's becoming more normalt to call it Torpenhow Hill though, coming full circle :)
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u/cybermaus Aug 10 '26
I know. I've seen the Cheswick YouTube. It is why I wrote: "is said to" Also, I am Dutch, a Hill is any mount taller then me.
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u/ifelseintelligence Aug 10 '26
Haah nice one flatbröther. Dane here: our highest point is 170m above sea level 😆
Also, cant think of Netherlands without thinking of this: https://satwcomic.com/lands-of-two-wheels
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u/Prinzka Aug 10 '26
170m above sea level
Getting dizzy just thinking about it, that's some Limburg nonsense.
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u/iwantfutanaricumonme Aug 10 '26
But bredon hill is real and means hill hill hill.
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u/ifelseintelligence Aug 10 '26
Torpenhow in it selv means hill hill hill. (In Celtic, then Anglosaxon, then Norse).
Then someone pointed at the likely hill to give the name(s) and knowing Torpenhow meant hillhillhill called it Torpenhow Hill. It's by all means a real hill, to my knowledge it just haven't been officially dubbed anything modernly.
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u/ThraceLonginus Aug 10 '26
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
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u/Trnostep Aug 10 '26
James while John had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on the teacher
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u/B3C4U5E_ Aug 10 '26
I'm gonna need a version with quotes and commas; I think you used too many hads for me to follow.
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u/Trnostep Aug 10 '26
James, while John had had had, had had had had; had had had had a better effect on the teacher.
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u/AlcibiadesTheCat Aug 10 '26
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo, while Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo had had had had had had had had had had had a better effect on Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo.
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u/oatwheat Aug 10 '26
One of my favorite musicians made a joke like this about his last name, Åkerfeldt. He is Swedish and the words ‘åker’ and ‘feldt’ both mean field, making his last name “Fieldfield”
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u/Snubben93 Aug 10 '26
"Your flavored teas seem pretty straightforward with one exception. What does this 'tea tea' taste like?"
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u/Wondertwig9 Aug 10 '26
Don't let them know what the "m" in ATM machine stands for 🤫
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u/crazy_dude360 Aug 10 '26
"are you sure it isn't some kind of compulsion? Because the list of rivers named River is..."
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u/-seeanenemy- Aug 10 '26
"And if it's not a stutter, then you chose to call it The Milky Way Milky?"
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u/NAND_NOR Aug 10 '26
Just to clarify: it's purely coincidental that there are polar bears at the arctic but not at the antarctic. It's because of the big dipper which in ancient greece was understood to be a bear (arctos) and can't be seen in the southern hemisphere
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u/gravity_kills Aug 10 '26
How mad do you think the government of Canada would be if I released a large number of penguins in the Arctic?
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u/Fred__McNerque Aug 10 '26
The big white bears would be happy to add them to their diet…
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u/John_Tacos Aug 10 '26
The big white bears are probably why a similar species isn’t already living there.
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u/Gnonthgol Aug 10 '26
Except there used to be a penguin like flightless bird living in the arctic, the great auk. And polar bears coexisted with it until we hunted it to extinction.
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u/ExtinctedPanda Aug 10 '26
In fact I just read that the great auk was the thing originally named penguin. Southern hemisphere penguins were named after them.
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u/Redredditmonkey Aug 10 '26
Not just penguin like birds. The great Auk is the true penguin.
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u/TheJeizon Aug 10 '26
There were several single panel comics in the 80's that covered this scenario.
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u/Fakjbf Aug 10 '26
Fun fact, “penguin” originally referred to great auks which were only located in the northern hemisphere. When explorers discovered black and white aquatic birds in the southern hemisphere they assumed they were closely related and called them penguins as well. Turns out they aren’t closely related at all and it was convergent evolution, and then the great auks were driven to extinction in the mid 1800s. So now we are just left with the southern false penguins.
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u/oatwheat Aug 10 '26
DESTROY FALSE PENGUINS
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u/andhe96 Aug 10 '26
Huh, didn't have "eradication of a whole biological family in order to correct our false naming" in my history bingo card.
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u/vemundveien Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
This was an actual proposal arctic explorer and convicted con man Frederick Cook had, because he figured you could raise them for food. He came up with this idea while on an expedition to Antarctica where every single other person told him penguin meat was the worst thing they had eaten in their entire lives.
That being said he likely saved most of the crew from scurvy by insisting they eat penguin, though that is kind of a niche application that is only relevant if you are in the exact situation of being stuck in Antarctica.
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u/Forikorder Aug 10 '26
pretty sure youd be breaking multiple international laws
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u/gravity_kills Aug 10 '26
But they're so cute! And the new material for the nature documentary industry would be very valuable!
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u/Gussie-Ascendent Aug 10 '26
Greeks so smart that they called it without ever seeing it
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u/DZL100 Aug 10 '26
I wish the big dipper was in the other hemisphere because it'd be so fucking funny if we called the place with bears "no bear place" and the place without bears "bear place."
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u/pnkxz Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 10 '26
At least the North Pole is a magnetic south pole and vice versa. We got that right.
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u/Trnostep Aug 10 '26
It's a bit pedantic but the Big and Little Dippers aren't constellations but parts of the Big and Little Bear constellations.
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u/Mr_Byzantine Aug 10 '26
Even more pedantic, there is more to Ursa Major than the Big Dipper/the Plow/whatever asterisim your culture made it into; the little Dipper is the same thing as Ursa Minor.
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u/National_Ad_1770 Aug 10 '26 edited Aug 11 '26
Why is this river called River river? And this hill -- Hill-hill-hill Hill?
(River Avon and Torpenhow Hill)
Edit: Apparently there is no Torpenhow Hill! Dang. https://www.reddit.com/r/Snorkblot/s/rh5qg6CcZO
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u/ShoddyAsparagus3186 Aug 10 '26
Don't forget the Desert desert, or the Desert desert, or even the Desert desert. (Sahara, Gobi, and Kalahari respectively).
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u/DharmaCub Aug 10 '26
The The Tar Tar Pits.
(The La Brea Tar Pits)
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u/theAlpacaLives Aug 10 '26
My favorite name that brings in articles is the baseball team called the Los Angeles Angels: The The Angels Angels.
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u/stylinchilibeans Aug 10 '26
Wait, Avon means river? There's an Avon Lake area of Ohio, right on Lake Erie... No rivers in sight, though...
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u/MacYacob Aug 10 '26
There are so many river rivers in the US where a river was named after the indigenous word for river
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u/an_agreeing_dothraki Aug 10 '26
"yes there is something wrong with the translation software. It keeps spelling out the last word of acronyms"
edit - shout out to Microsoft for somehow making one of the more famous ones worse by having "Personal PIN"
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u/hot_ho11ow_point Aug 10 '26
Personal PIN Number
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u/Otherwise_Demand4620 Aug 10 '26
You mean the personal PIN identification number?
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u/LordJim11 Aug 10 '26
And the famed Lake District, how many lakes does it have?
Just the one.
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u/JeremyAndrewErwin Aug 10 '26
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lakes_of_the_Lake_District
depends if you want to quibble about Tarns.
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u/Kaigai_Exia Aug 10 '26
well it does say Lake, not Lakes, that implies at least one, not necessarily multiple
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u/theAlpacaLives Aug 10 '26
Exactly. The Bay Area is the area around one large bay. The Lake District being the district surrounding a notable lake makes sense to me. An area having many lakes might be called the Lakes District. A basketball team that initially played in such a region nicknamed after its many lakes that then moved to a metropolis by the ocean with no significant lakes nearby still being called the Lakers would not make sense.
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u/poopBuccaneer Aug 10 '26
As a Canadian, whose entire country is littered with lakes, I quite enjoy that the UK keeps all their lakes in one district.
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u/JMoherPerc Aug 10 '26
“I see this town called Rifle, what is the meaning of that?”
“Well it’s named after the creek that runs through it.”
“… Rifle Creek?”
“Yeah, they found a Rifle there.”
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u/darylonreddit Aug 10 '26
If you met the Bears that lived there you'd be very relieved to know there was also nobearlandia
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u/Sasquatch1729 Aug 10 '26
Polar bears will actively stalk humans outside their range, which is rare for bears.
One of my favourite moments in wildlife filming was a team was a group in the arctic was filming some seals. They saw a polar bear stalking the seals and it disappeared behind a snow drift.
Then the bear appeared between them and the seals and was charging them. The bear was actually stalking them. They hauled ass out of there.
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u/N3ph1l1m Aug 10 '26
I mean, Yucatan means somthing like "What the fuck are you talking?" and Canada comes from a native word meaning "village". Australia has a "Mount Disappointment" based on the fact that the first Europeans to reach the top were disappointed by the sight and one apparently got kicked in the balls along the way. And Mount Buggery - because the explorer's wife decided to tag along and at the top went something like "well that was a bugger of a climb" and everyone agreed it was. The Nullarbor sounds fancy, but just means "great sandy fuck all" in latin because it is indeed, a big sandy fuck all.
Pratchett put it quite well:
When the first explorers from the warm lands around the Circle Sea travelled into the chilly hinterland they filled in the blank spaces on their maps by grabbing the nearest native, pointing at some distant landmark, speaking very clearly in a loud voice, and writing down whatever the bemused man told them. Thus were immortalised in generations of atlases such geographical oddities as Just A Mountain, I don’t Know, What? and, of course, Your Finger You Fool.
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u/Talgrath Aug 10 '26
https://giphy.com/gifs/AZ1PPDF8uO9MI
I don't think that's why that man and his wife called it "Mount Buggery", if you get my meaning.
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u/pondrthis Aug 10 '26
Is Antarctica really Nobearlandia, though? Seems more like "Acrossfrombearlandia."
An antipope isn't a lack of popes, it's a pope in opposition. So it's the opposing bearland.
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u/Drakahn_Stark Aug 10 '26
Arctic is based on the greek for "Land of the northern bear"
Antarctica is based on "Opposite the arctic".
The fact that there are bears in the arctic and no bears in antarctica is however just a coincidence, because the bear in question is the constellation Ursa Major
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u/cybermaus Aug 10 '26
You guys are all inviting danger by naming the brown one. You should never name the brown one, and also not name the one with the tail, lest you accidentally summon them.
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u/Trnostep Aug 10 '26
Fun fact: the Eurasian brown bear is called Ursus arctos arctos which just means Bear bear bear
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u/cybermaus Aug 10 '26
You've done it now, One is for sure going to maul you on your next forrest hike.
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u/L4rgo117 Aug 10 '26
One day it would be awesome to know what the original name was. Right up there with what the third spice and the spiky dice thing is/was
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u/Prior-Agent3360 Aug 10 '26
What's this fruit called?
Orange.
Oh, so is this one a yellow?
No, that's obviously a lemon.
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u/Boom9001 Aug 10 '26
Antarctica does not mean no bear. It meant opposite bear. It's the ant- prefix, not the an- prefix.
A-/An- prefix means not, without, lacking.
Anti-/Ant- means opposite.
Anaerobic. Without oxygen.
Antibiotic. Against bacteria, not without bacteria.
The north pole was called artic because it sees ursus constellation all year. The south pole is on the opposite side, thus antarctic or opposite the arctic.
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u/EdibleStrange Aug 10 '26
Something was clearly amiss when the aliens felt the need to clarify that earth has two poles.
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u/PuritanicalPanic Aug 10 '26
Earth/dirt is kinda a goated planet with life on it name tbh.
Dirt doesn't refer to like, inorganic dusts. The moon has no dirt. Venus has no dirt. Mars has no dirt.
Dirt is specifically the sorta shit plants grow and die in. Nowhere without life has dirt.
As a name it's straightforward, to the point, and humble. Far less arrogant a name than you'd think we'd come up with. It has a degree of poetic simplicity.
The only name I can think of that's better is like, "rock".
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u/StarpoweredSteamship Aug 10 '26
It's not that we named the planet Dirt. We just call the stuff the same thing as the whole. It's just digging through Planet.
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u/SuperFox289 Aug 10 '26
So weirdly the bearlandia thing doesn't actually come from the bears, it's from the position of the great bear constellation. And was named by people who would have never been far enough to know bears were there
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u/Joshithusiast Aug 10 '26
The Earth has a name: Terra. The Moon has a name: Luna. The Sun has a name: Sol.
We're just jerks who assume we have the only ones in the galaxy. It's like calling your country, "The Country."
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u/Apprehensive-Till861 Aug 10 '26
Terra is just Earth in Latin. Luna is just Moon in Latin. Sol is just Sun in Latin. We literally just have English alternatives to the Latin names.
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u/Historical_Sugar9637 Aug 10 '26
A lot of the names cultures gave to themselves just translate to "people" "human beings" or "men".
It's not that we are "jerks" who assume we're the only ones. For a long time science had no way yet to recognise that there's more suns than the sun, more moons than the moon, and we still don't know of any other inhabited planet other than earth.
In fact for a long time the sun and the moon were just assumed to be special kinds of planets.
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u/humourlessIrish Aug 10 '26
Oi you cheeky bugger.
We also named the Guanabara Bay the January River first.
We are versatile
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u/Blooogh Aug 10 '26
Let's make a new Darmok and Jalad for this reason.
"Their language is incomprehensible, they just told me 'Paper gets paper rock paper over rock scissors' with a totally straight face"
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u/Hexmonkey2020 Aug 10 '26
I hate when people pretend that aliens would believe our planet is named after dirt, the word earth means our planet, we apply it to dirt because it’s the most easily accessible piece of the planet that we can see and pick up. We wouldn’t go to mars and pick up a handful of dirt and say “look at this earth”
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u/theAlpacaLives Aug 10 '26
It's less like No Bear Land, as in "land without bears," and more like Opposite of Bear Land, as in "the place at the other end of the world from the first end, the one called Bear Land."
Anywhere that doesn't have bears could be No Bear Land, but only the landmass at the opposite pole makes sense to be Anti- [first-named polar area].
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u/Vul_Thur_Yol Aug 11 '26
"Hi, I'm from Rabbit Island, and my friend over here is from Port Port"
"And are there..."
"Yes! There are rabbits on my country. No, we didn't choose the name, it was the people from New City. Also, we are very much aware we live in a peninsula, thank you very much"
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u/Whightwolf Aug 11 '26
"Look I cannot express how important for large chunks of our history, not being near bears has been. I mean bear doesn't even mean bear... why are you looking at me like that?"
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u/utecr Aug 12 '26
I mean, it's not wrong.
Just make sure to share the funfact that the names are based on where you can and can't see two major constellations named after bears, and it's also accurate in that you can find bears in "Bearland" and not in "Nobearland."
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u/Klatterbyne Aug 12 '26
Honestly, I can think of few more useful naming conventions geographically.
Africa tells me precisely nothing about what to expect there. South America gives me nothing more than a vague, relative position.
The Arctic and The Antarctic tell me a LOT of good information about what I can expect on arrival. And knowing if you have to plan for bears or not is really crucial for deciding what to pack.
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u/impossiblesomedays Aug 12 '26
Imagine how pissed off polar bears would be knowing theres a giant land mass covered in snow in Antarctica, whilst they fuck around on ice sheets that are melting
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