Ok, so why are residents of Naples called "Neapolitans"? Because they like their ice cream flavors mixed together?

New Yokers

Attention Ira:

There's presently a contest in the San Francisco Chronicle for something that rhymes with San Francisco values. Good luck!

TSGs innit?

So why are Glasgow residents called Glaswegians?

I come from Glasgow,and have never heard as to where Glaswegians originates......The one that I am curious about is "Geordie"for persons from Newcastle-upon-Tyne.........I love "Geordies"as people.....What positive memories I have of that great city....Some would probably say that it was because geordies and people from Glasgow like to have a great amount of drink,it's almost like part of the culture that in both places you go out at weekends to get drunk !!!

Geordies apparently comes from the Jacobite rebellion. Newcastle was a royalist stronghold and the people became known as followers of King George, and given that they speak very strangely indeed up there, this became corrupted to Geordie.

I lived there for a year - and can remember very little about it. They do like their dog.

"Why is there no word in English that rhymes with "Orange"?"

Aah but Ira, there is. My anglo-saxon surname rhymes with Orange. It's the only reason my name ever gets mentioned on TV quiz shows.

Going back to PalQ's original question.

The other problem is that it's not just early Flanners who were illiterate: almost everyone, everywhere was till the middle of the 19th century. So if we want to know how a word evolved before 1830, we've only got what was written down - and preserved. And that's a tiny proportion of everything anyone ever spoke.

So all etymology is pretty speculative. A word like "all" is used so often, there are lots of sources and lots of debate so we can have a reasonably accurate idea of how it evolved. Words like "Liverpudlian" just get a "well, it was probably..." assumption, and everyone gives up. There is, as far as I'm aware, not a single real survival of the "puddle" joke: the assertions of the word's derivation all over the Web are just lots of people borrowing other people's assertions.

So here's my theory.

"Liverpool" refers to its Pool, a big inlet from the river, round which the earliest settlers lived. As the port developed, this pool was increasingly encroached on. And oddly, the first reference to "Liverpudlian" occurs about the same time the Pool was finally pretty well built over completely.

The 1811 Liverpool Dock Act allowed proper docks to be built over the Pool, and the 1826 Custom House was also built on what had once been the inlet. So by the 1820's there might well have been a joke that the city's Pool had turned into a Puddle.

But there's not a single scrap of evidence to prove this theory, since we don't actually know for certain that "Liverpudlian" post-dates the filling in of the Pool. My theory is merely compatible with the meagre evidence we've actually got.

What is the rhyme for porringer?
What is the rhyme for porringer?
The king he had a daughter fair
And gave the Prince of Orange her.

>so why are residents of Naples called "Neapolitans"? <

Because its original name was the Greek Neapolis.

IIRC, in France it's a standard item in the reference books to list the "official" way to refer to people from any given place (where it's -ais, -ois, -iens or whatever). But in the UK... it's the occasion for nineteenth-century jokes (my guess is that's where Glaswegian comes from; I've never heard a name for people from Edinburgh, but from the general image, it ought to be Edinbourgeois).

Well Edinbourgeois is obviously faine for the naice laidies of Mornigsaide. Might not work so well round the Trainspotting belt though.

But what about Middlesbourgeois? Is that a complete oxymoron?

People from Middlesbrough are called "smog monsters" or "smoggies".

Hi Kate,

Well, I had to look it up, but I take it that you are a Gorringe - yes?

Nice rhyme, Miss P.

((I))

Curses, discovered at last ;-)

Gongratulations on getting the spelling right..even my brother struggles with that one.