EDITOR’S CORNER
Got in an interesting discussion the other day about names of things and about how many of them actually have either different or longer names than we think.
Did you know we have four states which aren’t really states?
Yep. Massachusetts, Kentucky, Pennsylvania and Virginia are “commonwealths.”
What’s a commonwealth?
Its formal term is “a political community founded for common good.”
Now, of course, that’s a term so broad it could apply to almost anything which so desires to label itself as any kind of community.
But those four states entered our union with that name and, formally anyway, that’s what they still are.
We also have a state whose actual name is “The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”
New Englanders are unique in a lot of ways.
For instance, one writer, in a travel article on our most northeastern state noticed that the natives never refer to it as just “Maine.”
It’s “the state o’ Maine.” As in: “Ay uh wanna tell yuh. Nobody in the state o’Maine was happy-yuh than me when the Red Sox won the World Series.”
And you know what their state song is called? “The State of Maine Song.”
Oh yes, they do talk like that parody I just penned.
On my one trip to the state o’Maine many years ago I took a cruise in a small boat. The “captain”—a college kid—passed out life preservers with this admonition:
“Nuthin is, ah, gonna, happen a ya but the Coze God makes us do this.”
This Texan asked what the Coze God was, apprehensive it might be some kind of lobster worshiping cult.
The captain, a little irked, replied “Ya know, the Coze God, the Coze God, like the Merchant Marines!”
I asked him if he meant the Coast Guard, why didn’t he say it?
The cruise was beautiful. I kept my mouth shut with a little help from a lobster claw donated by the captain.
It’s a really good thing one big city’s official name got shortened.
I mean the city called “The Town of Our Lady the Queen of Angels of the River Porciuncula.”
Except it was in Spanish and it got shortened to that angel part. You know, Los Angeles. And that is many times shortened further to just “LA”.
There’s another example much closer to home.
Have you been to San Antonio de Bexar? I’ll bet you have.
The nation’s seventh largest city began its life not even as a town, but as a fort.
It was founded as “Presidio San Antonio de Bexar.”
But we just call it San Antonio or sometimes “San Antone.”
Whatever you call it, it’s one of the greatest cities anywhere.
There’s something else whose shortened name is used so commonly many don’t know its full name. This newspaper is formally The Rockdale Reporter & Messenger.
Here’s how it happened. The Milam County Messenger was originally established in Cameron but in the fall of 1873 its owners moved it to Rockdale and renamed it The Rockdale Messenger.
Four years later just about everything wooden in Rockdale burned to the ground, including the newspaper.
But it was rebuilt—the town and the paper.
In 1893 The Rockdale Reporter came along. When The Messenger’s owner, a man named Howard Wilson, died just after the turn of the 20th Century, his heirs sold it to R. W. H. Kennon.
Kennon was the publisher of The Reporter. He merged the two papers. And it’s been The Rockdale Reporter & Messenger ever since.
And it’s also pretty much been called The Reporter by everyone ever since.
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