There are two possible reasons to suggest calling a new town Athelstan. One is to annoy certain people by not picking it. The other is to annoy them even more by doing so, thereby inciting and enabling them to whinge for all time that it should have been Æthelstan. One or other of those is now bound to happen. Such fun, and comparable only to laughing at the Kammgirls if Winston Churchill were kept on the five pound note after all. But that is not a done deal. This is. Tee-hee.
In England, it should be Elizabethton, not Elizabethtown, but neither trips off the tongue. A town named after Clement Attlee would more elegantly be called Attlee, not Attleeton. And the Pankhurst is apparently Emmeline, who died the Conservative Party candidate for a Labour seat in Parliament. But although there is a neighbourhood of Singapore, and although it features in a number of street names, there is no town called Mountbatten, just as there has never been a Principality of Battenberg. Let there be a town of Mountbatten at last. And in the same spirit of anglicisation, let there be a town of Epstone.
Everybody pronounces Epstein the Yiddish way now, Jeremy Corbyn was called Hitler when he did that.
ReplyDeleteWhen they do it, then it is a WASP elite way of cutting him adrift. But it won't work.
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