Naming Places In My World & Why It Takes Me Forever

Sometimes, I spend hours trying to pick a good name for a place in my stories. This sounds silly, but the names we choose for our fiction matter because they matter in real life.

Location-Naming Practices

In the real world, the name of a place can tell you a little bit about what that place is like, what kinds of people the owners of that place respect or honor, or concepts and ideals that are valued there. We can confidently say that the most common place-naming practices of humans center around qualities, people, or concepts.

Qualities

Naming a place after a quality is useful because it makes identifying the right place easy. If you're trying to get to a place called Huge Purple Desert, you'll probably figure out you're there when you see a huge purple desert.

Places named after their qualities:

• The Yellowstone River
• Named after the yellow sandstone bluffs that line the riverbanks
• The Great Plains
• This should be pretty obvious how it got its name …
• The Rocky Mountains
• This one should also be easy
• The Himalayas
• The word "Himalaya" comes from Sanskrit, meaning "abode of snow"
• The Sahara
• The word "Sahara" comes from the Arabic word "çahra," which means "desert"
• The Cuyahoga River
• The word "Cuyahoga" is an Anglicized spelling of the word "cayagaga," a Mohawk or Iroquois word that means "crooked river"

People

Consider all the places in the United States named after Martin Luther King Jr., Robert E. Lee, or previous presidents. When we name places after people, it shows what we value, it shows who our heroes are, who we deem worthy of honor.

Places named after people:

• The city of Alexandria in Egypt
• Named after Alexander the Great
• Washington State in the United States
• Named after George Washington
• The city of Rome in Italy
• Named after the mythical founder of Rome, Romulus
• The nation of Israel
• Named after the biblical Israel (also known as Jacob)

Concepts

When we name places after concepts, it can tell people about the intangible things we value.

Places named after concepts:

• The city of Memphis in Tennessee
• Named after the Egyptian city of Memphis, which comes from the ancient Egyptian word "men-nefer," meaning "enduring beauty"
• Nihon – the nation of Japan
• Nihon is the Japanese word for Japan, and it means "where the sun originates." It is often translated to "Land of the Rising Sun" in English
• Zhōngguó – the nation of China
• Zhōngguó is the Chinese word for China, which literally means "middle kingdom" or "middle state," which refers to the ancient Chinese worldview that China was the center of the world
• The city of Philadelphia
• The founder of the city, William Penn, combined two ancient Greek words, "philos" and "adelphos" to mean "brotherly love"

Naming Places in Stories

The world I’m building is very different from ours. It’s an alien planet called Jakad, and everything about it is alien. The trees are not trees, only tree-like. The animals are not animals, just animal-like. There are humans on this planet, humans from fifty thousand years ago, taken from Earth to become slaves, then lost and forgotten on Jakad.

Humanity spreads across the land, and even though the world is completely alien, they manage to make it feel somewhat human. And part of that human-ness comes from the way they name things in the world around them.

So.

Here’s how I’ve gone about it, and here’s why it often takes me hours to settle on the right name for a place.

I have my map that I drew.

© Jessica McKendry

I started naming the most obvious places. The subcontinents, the rivers, the lakes, the mountains. Since I have created a unique language for each region of this continent, I named everything in the language tied to that location.

Take the mountain range near the bottom of the map, just beneath the big lake. The people who live in the mountains believe that these mountains are holy and that they are at the very top of the world. I wanted the name of this mountain range to meet three requirements:

1. The name should reflect the beliefs of the people living there
2. The name should sound like it belongs to the language of the people living there
3. The name should sound good to me

I'm very picky about words. There are some words I absolutely hate just because of how they sound, like moist or honkytonk.

Those words give me the ick.

I ended up choosing the name Phoraïth, which, in my made-up language, Pharais, comes from the roots pho- (meaning high, elevated, or supreme) and -raïth (meaning crown, crest, or pinnacle). Together, the words mean The High Crown, which perfectly fits the beliefs of the people living there. I also like the sound of the name, and it fits the language.

Near the top right of the continent, there is a large, rounded peninsula. This is a wetland, and the people who live there call it Molakai, which means Land of Reeds in the language of that region.

Sometimes, I’m not quite sure what I want a place to be like, so I need to spend some time thinking about the environment and what makes a certain place special. I have developed some of the world's history, so there will definitely be places named after historical figures important to each region, but I haven’t gotten that far yet.

That’s next week’s problem!

Writers, how do you pick names for places in your stories? Readers, do you like it when the names of places in the books you read are well thought out? Or does it not matter?

Tough Choices

An Autofiction

It took a bit of courage to ask the difficult question, but it needed to be asked. I needed to know.

"How long do you think he has?"

I couldn't look at the vet, so I watched as Jasper happily sniffed his way around the examination room. When he got to me, he licked my shoe, then looked up at me, his tongue hanging joyfully out of the side of his mouth.

"Well, it's hard to say," the vet responded. Her voice was kind, though there was a note of sadness in it. "Some dogs in his condition really pull through. But ... I wouldn't expect years, at this point."

Over the summer, I had come to this conclusion on my own. Jasper kept losing weight, despite the countless treats and heaping meals we gave him. The muscles all along his spine and hips had atrophied, until he started to look like a walking skeleton. He looked like those dogs on TV, the ones you'd see on some Animal Planet rescue show, where they go in and save starving dogs from neglectful or abusive parents.

"Is he eating?" The vet asked.

I nodded. "Like a vacuum. We give him two cups of food a day, plus a lot of treats. He was overweight a few years ago, and you guys told us to cut back on his food."

She hummed softly, then wrote something down on her clipboard. "Alright, let's give him as much food as he wants now."

"Well ... he would eat until he explodes," I told her.

"Ah," she said with a soft laugh. "We don't want that, do we, Jasper? Two heaping cups of food in the morning, and two in the evening, then."

Jasper looked over at her when she said his name, then wagged his tail and waddled toward her. She took out a bag of treats, and his tail became wild, wiggling fast as he opened his mouth to pant, excitedly. For the next few minutes, she would be his best friend in the whole wide world.

The vet tossed him a treat, and he snatched it right out of the air. "He's got good reflexes," she said. "And he's such a happy boy."

Jasper just stared at her, tongue hanging out, his dark eyes wide and adoring.

“What should we do?” I asked the vet.

She looked at me with a gentle, solemn expression. “It’s up to you. We can run panels of bloodwork and take X-rays until we figure out what else is going on with him … or we can make sure he’s comfortable.

My eyes began to burn. I knew this conversation would come eventually, and as Jasper’s condition has worsened over the months, I’ve felt it creeping closer and closer.

Yet, now that it had actually come, it felt like being hit by a truck.

Jasper is one of my best friends. He’s my buddy. To imagine that we were at a point where it wouldn’t make sense to keep looking for what was wrong with him … it was heartbreaking. I wanted to tell her to do the bloodwork, the X-rays. I would have, if I were making more money.

The vet must have seen the pain on my face. “You guys have already gone above and beyond for him.”

I nodded and looked at him, whose tail was tapping quickly against the floor as he stared up at the vet, waiting for another treat. She handed him one, and he joyfully gobbled it up before resuming the exact same position, begging for yet another.

“Okay,” I said softly. “What can we do to make him more comfortable?”

She prescribed more carprofen, a drug that would help reduce the pain from his arthritis. It is also a drug that can cause liver and kidney damage with prolonged use, but at this point, we aren’t sure what the long-term looks like for him. If he even has a long-term.

We went home, and he was very happy to get a surprise second bowl of food for dinner. I sat next to him as he ate. He didn’t even notice me until he was finished eating, and then he came to sit in my lap. I pet his fluffy ears, and his tongue started hanging out the side of his mouth again.

“You are the worst dog,” I told him lovingly, then kissed him on his head and hugged him. He leaned backward into me, leaning his upside-down face against my shoulder.

I wondered what he knew. He must have known I felt sad. He must realize he doesn’t quite move like he used to. Does he wonder why things hurt, or does he simply accept them? Does he know his body is starting to fail him? Would he hate me if he could understand that we aren’t trying to fix him anymore?

He sniffed my chin and gave me a stinky lick. His breath smelled terrible but I couldn’t even manage to be disgusted at the moment. I laughed and squeezed him tighter. It seemed like answer enough.

“Love you too, buddy.”

Jasper at the Vet
© Jessica McKendry

My Whole World Just Shifted – Adventures in Cartography

Last week, I was at my parents' house, sitting at their kitchen island and drawing a map for Convergence. So far, this is my hand-drawn world map, created on my iPad using Procreate.

As a science-fiction writer and someone who loves science in general, I appreciate it when stories take real science into consideration. No, it isn't necessary, I just like it.

However, I sometimes take it a little too far. For example, here's a little bit of my thought process moving forward with this map.

ME: Time to draw the equator. *starts drawing a red line through the middle*

BRAIN: Wait! If you draw the equator there, then the continent where your story is taking place is going to be really hot. You wanted more temperate climates for your main continent?

ME: Yeah … I did … hmm … *looks at a map of Earth* wow. There really isn't much land below the equator. Okay, well, I think it would be cool to have more landmass on this planet below the equator.

BRAIN: Above or below doesn't really matter. There's no "right side up" in space, so all that matters is which areas you want to be colder and which areas you want to be warmer.

ME: Wait … it doesn't matter? Hold on. *looks at a map of Earth again*

BRAIN: See? The direction North or South doesn't actually matter. You can flip them, and it doesn't change anything. The magnetic poles change every few hundred thousand years, too.

ME: Hold on. So who decided to draw the Earth like that? Who decided to draw the Earth "right side up" if it doesn't matter? Has anyone ever drawn the Earth the other way?

BRAIN: *tries to shrug, but it has no shoulders*

So I spent the next thirty minutes looking at maps of the Earth, and realizing that "North" being at the "top" of the world is an entirely arbitrary decision. We could have just as easily called it "South," and drawn all our maps with Greenland and Russia at the bottom, and Antarctica at the very top.

Which makes a lot of sense, because in space, there's no up or down, we just don't often have to think about it unless you spend hours and hours drawing maps. Modern maps could easily look like this:

Apparently, there were many cultures in the past that placed East at the top of the map instead of North for various reasons. Essentially, the use of the North Star for navigation and Eurocentric perspectives contributed to the development of modern maps, with Europe at the top center of it all.

I voiced this revelation out loud to my mom, and her brain just about exploded.