Didsbury

I now live in Didsbury. I think I have always wanted to live somewhere with a name like that. It is so very English. Nearby we have Wythenshawe, Fallowfield, and, my personal favourite, Chorlton-cum-Hardy.

English place names are a source of considerable fascination (not to mention entertainment). They often contain interesting information about the history of the area. For instance, Didsbury is supposedly a corruption (I believe the technical terms would be elision and palatisation, but Talinn is not here to help me out with that) of Dyddi's Burg. (No, not that Diddy.) Dyddi had a stronghold here at one time. Now the only strongholds are the pubs, but Dyddi is immortalized through the name of the village.

Meanwhile, the Withi- in Wythenshawe, Withington, and other English names derives from an Old English word for tree. Places with Chester in their name are usually called so because there were Castles there. Minsters involve prominent churches (Westminster being the most famous example, I suppose). The use of adjectives to distinguish different places provides particular amusement: for instance "Little Heck" and "Great Heck".

This, of course, is great material for novelists, e.g. J.K. Rowling's "Little Whinging", which sounds funny enough to be real, but actually isn't. The truth is that this subject is too complex for me to do it justice. There are whole books and societies focused on this stuff. And you soon learn that since this is a land that has been conquered so many times that the linguistic origins of placenames can be quite complicated. Different parts of the country lean towards Gaelic roots, Saxon names, or even Viking ones. Not to mention the layer of civilized French-ed-ness that was added after 1066. Well, they weren't French then, but you know what I mean.

Place names here do seem to convey some sense of what the place is---or at least was. (There are no Diddy's here now, that I'm aware of.) In this sense they seem to grow organically out of the many many years of history that sit on the land. Last weekend we walked through a hill fort. There were only earth-works, and they had faded into the hill, but they had been there since the Iron Age. That's roughly 3000 years. And, unlike in North America (or Australia), the people who were here 3000 years ago never got completely conquered. There was a lot of blending in with all those waves of invaders, a lot of inter-marrying. So bits, including place names, tended to get left behind, carrying a tangible sense of the past into the present.

I suppose as a New World-er I find this impressive. I suppose also that if I understood Native American (or Aboriginal) place names I could get the same sort of sense in the US or Australia. But American names, in particular, are often more aspirational than descriptive. "We want a town which is a place of higher learning, let's call it Athens." Or "Lets found the City of Brotherly Love". Or all those housing estates with vaguely English sounding names. "Manor View", "Oak Dale", "Elm Crest". And often not a Manor, Oak, Elm (or Crest) in sight.

Which, in the end, is a funny phenomenon. Because I think that means that lots of people want, or think they want, to live in an English village. Meanwhile (at least according to wikipedia) Didsbury has quite the cafe culture: places to drink coffee, outdoor tables, and multiple Italian restaurants. Which I find pretty funny. Real estate here is not cheap. So apparently people will pay quite a bit to live in somewhere that is trying to look like somewhere in the Italian countryside. So you have to make a bunch of money to get the lifestyle that Italian peasants got to have for hundreds of years. Well, not really, because they probably only got to eat meat once a week, and had to eat root vegetables six months of the year. As well as washing twice a year. But something that _feels_ like it could be the life of Italian peasants---even if it smells better.