There’s something about folk stories behind names that makes the world feel richer. Names, after all, aren’t just labels—they’re little windows into the past, into the way people once understood the world. And when the official explanation is dry, people fill in the gaps with something better.
Take “Dead Man’s Curve.” Nearly every town seems to have one, and the official reason is always something like “a particularly dangerous turn in the road.” But ask the locals, and you’ll hear about the ghostly hitchhiker, the doomed lovers, or the man who lost control of his carriage a hundred years ago and still walks the roadside at night. None of it holds up to scrutiny, but which version would you rather believe?
This came up when my friend Mike told me about Pelican, Alaska. He lived in Pelican before Wikipedia. The story he was told was that the town was named because an actual pelican—some strange, lost traveler from distant waters—landed there one day and refused to leave. Maybe it was a good omen, maybe it was a bad one. Maybe it was just stubborn. But whatever the case, the town took its name from that unlikely visitor, a bird far from home in a place it had no business being.
But then Wikipedia comes along and ruins that illusion. The real story? Pelican was named after The Pelican, a fish-packing boat that helped establish the town’s cold storage facility. Logical, factual, utterly unremarkable. The kind of explanation that settles the matter so neatly it leaves nothing left to wonder about.
The problem with Wikipedia and modern fact-checking is that it does its job too well. It’s good to know the truth, of course, but the truth alone can feel so flat. A street named after a city planner is boring; a street named because someone saw a ghostly figure at dusk is unforgettable. When we debunk these myths, we don’t just lose falsehoods—we lose meaning, we lose magic, we lose the idea that the world is shaped not just by paperwork, but by the stories we tell about it.
And let’s be honest: if a lone pelican really had landed in that remote Alaskan inlet one day, against all odds, and made it its home—wouldn’t that be a better story?
Addendum
As an addendum, here’s an interesting sketch from John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme about how smartphones kill pub conversations. It’s a small but familiar tragedy: someone asks a question, a debate sparks, theories are thrown around—and then, inevitably, someone looks up the answer. The moment the truth is revealed, the conversation doesn’t reach a satisfying conclusion; it simply stops. The back-and-forth, the ridiculous guesses, the collective effort to stretch memory and logic as far as they’ll go—all gone in an instant.
John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme
Season 3 Episode 1 (transcript source, audio)
Don’t kill chats in pubs
Woman 1: No, but look. Four of the world’s five biggest cities are now in China, so unle-
Woman 2: What, is that true?!
Woman 1: Yeah, I think so.
Man 1: Name them.
Woman 1: I can’t name them. It’s, it’s true, I read it.
Man 2: What, bigger than New York?
Man 3: New York? New York’s not the biggest city in the world.
Man 2: Well, what is, then?
Man 3: I d-, I don’t know, um… Delhi?
Man 1: It’s Tokyo.
Man 3: No, no, there’s no way Tokyo’s bigger than Delhi.
Man 1: No, it is Tokyo, I looked it up on my phone. It’s Tokyo.
Woman 2: Oh.
Man 2: Oh, right.
Woman 1: Okay.
Announcer: And just like that, the conversation died. Died? No. Murdered! Another victim chalked up to Phones in Pubs. That’s why we at the Campaign for Real Pub Conversations say: not just Pub Quizzes – all pub chat should be conducted under conditions of artificial ignorance. Look at this chap. He was just about to pick somewhere really ridiculous, but which sounded just about plausible, to pretend he believed was the biggest city in the world, so that he could enjoy arguing that it might be, and everyone else could enjoy mocking him. Where would it have been?
Man 2: Havana.
Announcer: Havana! What a brilliant, stupid argument that would have been. All gone now. Gone the same way as the potential forty minutes of fun the table next door could have had, trying to work out how the ink in Kindles works. Or the full hour that the two blokes at the bar would have enjoyed, trying to remember Angela Lansbury’s name. So remember: think twice before you Google. You could be killing a chat.
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