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| Even locals can't agree on spelling of Lake Chargoggagoggmanch
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November 21, 2004 By PAM BELLUCK The New York Times CHARGOGGAGOGGMANCHAUGGAGOGGCHAUBUNAGUNGAMAUGG, Mass. — It is spelled just like it sounds. Unless you spell it differently, like the sign put up by the chamber of commerce at the southern end of town, which has an O for one of the U's and an H for one of the N's. Or the postcards at Waterfront Mary's, the lake's best-known restaurant, which have smuggled an extra "gaug" into the name. Even for the locals who live around this sprawling central Massachusetts lake with the even more sprawling name, Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg — the longest place name in the country — is not for the tied of tongue. Gone are the years when Ethel Merman and Ray Bolger made it a name you could dance to in a tune called "The Lake Song": "Oh, we took a walk one evening and we sat down on a log By Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. There, we told love's old sweet story and we listened to a frog In Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg." Or the time, in 1949, the state, on a lexicographical mercy mission, wanted to remove two of the lake's 15 G's, prompting a poet named Bertha A. Joslin to write "Touch not a G of our big lake!" These days, as often as not, lots of people here call the lake Webster, after the infinitely more prosaic name of the town that encompasses it. "I can't spell it, but that's off the record," said Bob Craver, the 52-year-old town clerk of Webster, whose family has owned homes on the lake for generations. Jane Hill, vice president of the Webster Lake Association, a recently formed group of some 400 lake homeowners, rankled some folks by spelling the C-word on the club's logo, T-shirts and jackets with 49 letters — instead of 45. "I've tried a few different spellings and every time, someone tells me I spell it wrong," Hill said. "So now I just have the official Jane Hill spelling." There is more consensus on the meaning of Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg, but it turns out the consensus is wrong. In the 1920s, a reporter for The Webster Times, Lawrence J. Daly, wrote that it was a Nipmuck Indian word meaning "You fish on your side, I fish on my side and nobody fishes in the middle." That stuck even though Daly confessed repeatedly that he had made the whole thing up. The real meaning, said Paul Macek, a historian in Webster, a community of about 17,000 just northwest of where Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts intersect, is "English knifemen and Nipmuck Indians at the boundary or neutral fishing place." But today, a boat ride across the slate-blue water makes one thing clear: This is no longer your English knifeman's Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. "Our landscape is even starting to change," said Judy Morrison, skimming across the lake on a flat white pontoon boat one recent brisk fall day. "The northern side of our lake was all forest — there wasn't one house on that hillside. Within the last three years people have gone in and cut out huge tracts of trees, just so they could build a couple of houses and have a wonderful view. That really burns me up." Robert S. Reichenberg, 89, who has lived his entire life — well, six months of every year — in a cottage on one of the lake's islands, remembers when a floating vegetable salesman would row from Goat Island to Checkerberry Island and on, hawking green beans and corn. "This place is just our home," said Reichenberg, whose cottage was on stilts until the 1936 hurricane pushed it flush with the ground. "A lot of people didn't really know about it." Now, most cottages have been razed and the vast majority of the 800 lakeside homes are year-round residences, some worth a million dollars or more. These days, the lake's homeowners, through the Webster Lake Association, are battling another consequence of modernity: environmental fallout, including contaminated water runoff and rapacious water weeds. "We realize we have to teach people how to take care of a watershed," said Dick Cazeault, president of the lake association, which exterminates the weeds and sends people out to test water weekly. Still, not everything is changing. Everyone knows a Webster Lake will never have the je ne sais quoi (or the je ne peux pas le prononcer) of a Lake Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. "There's some things in life that ought to be able to live in exaggeration," Cazeault said. There is even talk of trying to get into the Guinness World Records book. There is no category yet for longest lake name, said Sam Knights, a spokesman for Guinness. There is one for longest place name, and alas, it is someplace else. The honor goes to what the Guinness people call the "most scholarly transliteration" of the official name for Bangkok: krungthephphramahanakhon bowonratanakosin mahintharayuthaya mahadilokphiphobnovpharad radchataniburirom udomsantisug. Now that would have made a catchy Ethel Merman song. |
| Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.com
is the longest single word (without hyphens) .com domain name in the
world. It was registered by Internetters on 21st October 1999.
This Welsh town actually exists and its name translates as "The church of St. Mary in the hollow of white hazel trees near the rapid whirlpool by St. Tysilio's of the red cave". For brevity, it is understandable that many of the locals simply refer to their village as "Llanfair" www.llanfair.com or "Llanfair PG" or "Llanfairpwll" which, of course, makes for easier typing and is faster to pronounce. |
THE 100 OLDEST CURRENTLY-REGISTERED .COM DOMAINS 1. 15-Mar-1985 SYMBOLICS.COM |
| If I dig a very deep hole, where I go to stop? Find the end of your hole. |
