A Curious Little Blog

I have ambivalent feelings about the desirability of strict limitations on immigration to America.  I have no ambivalence about people who violate laws that are already passed:  it is wrong, and it ought to be dealt with.  Granting illegal aliens an amnesty just because they have come here in such numbers that we can't deal with them seems like a poor excuse for public policy.  If amnesty is inevitable (I'm not sure that it is, but if), then we should make it difficult.  The illegals should have to reside in an ambiguous probationary state for a long time, say 10 years, paying taxes the whole time.  Any criminal conviction would void the amnesty and require immediate repatriation. Even this, however, doesn't seem very onerous compared to what legal immigrants have to go through.  I heard an excellent suggestion (hat tip: Joe Thomas at  The Afternoon Constitutional ) that illegal aliens might be granted a path to citizenship only on the condition...

Since I've been writing about languages in U.S. geographical names, I wanted to say a word about state mottoes.  The vast majority of these are in English or Latin -- 20 Latin, 24 English.  I looked for geographical patterns in the language used, but found none.  Of the original 13 colonies (which one might expect to have used more Latin), six are in Latin and six in English.  (More on the exception in a moment.)  From a few mottoes that I knew, I thought Southern states might prefer Latin, but I counted six Latin and six English there, as well.  The one area that my hunch seemed a little more on target was that Midwestern states preferred English mottoes two to one. Six of the eight mottoes that predate 1800 are in Latin, but the oldest of all is the single English word "Hope," adopted by Rhode Island in 1644.  It is interesting that two states with English mottoes have adopted new, Latin mottoes since the turn of the millennium, Kentucky and North ...

I have mentioned the surprising influence of French on American names.  Spanish has had even more influence, but this is less surprising.  You could probably name a dozen cities with Spanish name for saints, as well as a few with common Spanish words -- Amarillo (yellow), El Paso (the pass), Las Vegas (the meadows).  Five states bear names that are plain Spanish words -- Florida (flowery), Colorado (coloured red), Montana (mountainous), California (hot), and Nevada (snow-covered) -- and others have Spanish-influenced names.  The city of Toldeo, Ohio, however, appears to have little to do with any direct Spanish influence. France and Spain were present in North America during the early stages of settlement, which is why so much of the land's names are influenced by them rather than by German, which was the native language of more Americans than any other country (at least according to Wikipedia).  Apart from a few small communities, such as Germantown (Pennsylv...