The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Lois Fundis:

Wikipedia says, "Ohio is an Iroquois word meaning 'good river.'" This is an oversimplification in that the Iroquois were (and are) several different nations speaking closely-related but different languages.Many of the native people who lived in this area* at the time white folks** started moving in were Iroquoian; a group called "Mingo" ("enemy" or "stranger" in the Lenni Lenape, or Delaware, tongue) were mostly Seneca and seem to have been the dominant group in this part of the valley at the time. I suspect "Ohio" is their word, more or less, but the history is a bit jumbled.

The French translated the name of the river as "La Belle Riviere", which is how it's shown on many early maps of the area. (They included the Allegheny River as part of La Belle Riviere, too.) The English/American settlers seem to have restored the Indian name, and "the Ohio Country" as they called it included most of the valley from well above Pittsburgh to down around Louisville, if not all the way to the Mississippi.

*I live in Weirton, West Virginia, which is on the Ohio River, 35 miles west of Pittsburgh, just across the river from Steubenville, Ohio, and 30 miles north of Wheeling, West Virginia (which is the county seat of Ohio County, so named 27 years before the state of Ohio was formed). This region was a hotbed of disputes among Indians, French, and English (including between Virginia and Pennsylvania) for much of the 1700s, from before the "French and Indian War" (a.k.a. the Seven Years War) to the Whiskey Rebellion.

**Some of the white folks brought black folks with them, too, of course. As slaves, at least mostly; many of the settlers were from Virginia, after all -- and this was Virginia until 1863 -- but slavery was still legal in Pennsylvania in the early days, too. Just last week a lady was telling me a family story from those times about a woman from our area who was taken captive by Indians. (This would have been in the 1780s or so.) With her was another woman she kept describing as "a black helper." I don't think the person telling me the story could admit to the S word, and I was too polite to bring it up, but I'd be willing to bet the black "helper" was not there of her own free will.

I posted last February about football fight songs. Of course, this was American football, specifically Pittsburgh Steelers fan-written songs (SF fen might think of it as filk) written in the buildup to the Super Bowl. "Vindaloo" and its kin sound very similar in spirit to such local efforts as "Here We Go Steelers".

College football is not immune to silly lyrics in their official fight songs, either. For example, the classic line in my alma mater's song, "alleghenee, genac, genac, genac". Nor is this anything new: if I recall my freshman indoctrination correctly (it's been mumblety-eight years) the song was written in the pre-WWI era -- 1914, give or take a few -- so it's pretty well great-great-grandfathered in now.

A headline local paper had a typo the other night that I see all too often: "solider" (as in "solider killed in Iraq").

Since one of the local Catholic parish schools closed its doors, we no longer seem to get "Scared" as in "Scared Heart." Unfortunately, "solider" seems to have replaced it.

We've got a con con con con con in Kalamazoo
The dealers' room's cool, you can act like a fool
In Kalamazoo-zoo-zoo-zoo-zoo


I'd write more, but my internal jukebox is shifting over to "In the Mood." (Blame my mom the Glenn Miller fan.)

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