I sometimes wonder if the folks reading anything I write even think I’m into geocaching at all. Why? Because I feel I sometimes go on random tangents about things that may be tangentially related to geocaching for me, but are completely separate to most cachers’ experiences. Today, my friends, is one of those days. And our pet subject for the day is linguistics!
We can all agree that I have been to a few counties in my travels, yes? For a very long time, since I was driving around Texas, making weekend trips for new counties, I’ve been been wanting to describe a naming convention with counties, specifically how some counties have seats that share the name of their respective county (e.g. Llano, Bastrop, Mason) and others have seats that are variants of their counties (e.g. Kerrville, Karnes City, Floydada). For a while I wracked my brain trying to figure out terms that would describe those two states, preferably along with one to describe a complete naming mismatch (e.g. Houston, Tilden, Sulphur Springs). Nothing came to mind. That’s not entirely true: things came to mind, but they were less words than phrases. I have long considered putting the question to bigger word nerds than myself but I ran into the great conundrum we all face: when I was in those spaces, I wasn’t thinking about it and when I was thinking about, I wasn’t in those spaces. For years, the question has simmered in the back of my head as both my life and the world have ebbed and flowed around me. A couple of nights ago, I found myself considering the question again, mentally playing around with the word parity, but discarding it because there is no adjectival form of it in English (I would have thought parietal but that has a very different, specific meaning). I considered perhaps pairing it somehow with nominative but was worried that it might cause confusion and also lack a certain elegance. And then it hit me. Why am I trying to treat a word meaning equal like a prefix when there is a perfectly adequate prefix in English that means the same thing? And that is how I came to coin the word conominative. Breaking it down, it seems to mean something along the lines of “jointly bearing a name.” That would seem to almost perfectly describe having a paired name like Zapata does. There is a prefix that would better suit the meaning, but I opted not to use it because I don’t think it would flow as well. But what about variants such as Crosbyton? Well, using the same logic, seminominative or “partially bearing a name” seems like a good fit. And it turns out that those words don’t seem to exist. I tried an online search and found neither of them. I may have just created two new words! Of course, I need a word to describe mismatching cases (which is the bulk of them) such as Raymondville. Here I ran into a problem. The two obvious options based on my two new words are either heteronominative (my preferred choice) or antinominative. The problem with them, though, is that both words, while niche, have specific and differing meanings in the field of linguistics. While it would make sense to appropriate one of them for my purposes (it’s not like English words don’t have multiple meanings depending on how and in which field they are used), I feel a little wonky about taking an already defined word and repurposing it, even it it does fit a specific pattern I have established. I don’t need to define them right this minute anyway. I still want to find a term for counties with seat names connected by other means, especially forming names of people (e.g. Borden, Rains, and Jones Counties) or other, more delicate connections (such as Upshur or, leaving Texas, Montezuma Counties). In a perfect world, I could come up with another term that covers counties that have seats that match other counties but are not paired with them (e.g. Austin is not the seat of Austin County, Cameron is not the seat of Cameron County, etc.). But I should relax. I just created two new words. I’ve done enough for now.
