Skip to main content

The problems of Edinburgh living

From a link on Improbable Research, this demonstrates the dilemma of locating Edinburgh streets...I would say it would explain why my useless sofa company continues to have to phone me for each incompetent attempt at delivery of yet another broken sofa, but nah, that's just them being utterly useless!!!
By dropping the word "Street" from my address, they've made me un-locateable!

An extract -

Buckstone is a particularly promiscuous forename. Street atlases list All of these:

Buckstone Avenue Buckstone Bank Buckstone Circle Buckstone Close
Buckstone Court Buckstone Crescent Buckstone Crook Buckstone Dell
Buckstone Drive Buckstone Gardens Buckstone Gate Buckstone Green
Buckstone Grove Buckstone Hill Buckstone Lea Buckstone Loan
Buckstone Loan East Buckstone Neuk Buckstone Place Buckstone Rise
Buckstone Road Buckstone Row Buckstone Shaw Buckstone Terrace
Buckstone View Buckstone Way Buckstone Wood Buckstone Wynd

That's 28 different Buckstone streets. And for good measure there is also one that has no classname, just an attributive premodifier of the forename: High Buckstone.

There are actually way over fifty ways to lose your lover in this city's streets. We get the first fifty from the fact that a cursory glance through a street index reveals that all of the following words to be quite common as street classnames in Edinburgh:

Approach Crescent Green Parade Square
Arcade Crest Hill Park Street
Avenue Dean Lane Passage Terrace
Bank Dell Lea Path View
Boulevard Drive Loan Place Villas
Circle End Mains Promenade Walk
Circus Entry Market Quadrant Way
Close Gait Mews Rise Wood
Cottages Gardens Mount Road Wynd
Court Glebe Neuk Row Yard

But in fact, for any chosen forename, we can make many more than fifty well-formed street names.

Comments

Meg said…
And I thought Queens in NY was bad! That is truly astonishing!

Popular posts from this blog

What's in a name?

In the case of this blog, it's a name that had no particular thought or planning behind it - I had no idea whether I would actually want to keep it going, what I would blog about, or that anyone would ever read it. Well, it's almost 4 years later (17th June 2007 is blog birthday, if we're counting), and the blog's still here, so I think we can now safely assume that it's probably going to be sticking around. And the name's been getting on my nerves a bit...you have no idea the amount of people who have found this blog looking for ladies called Jennie Law or Jenny Law. Personally, I'm not actually called Jennie Law, so I'm no help to these poor searchers, although for the right fee I could maybe consider pretending to be... I also don't blog a huge amount about law: I'm not a lawyer, I just have the job of finding stuff for lawyers. Sometimes that process amuses me, sometimes it annoys me, and I blog about it. Sometimes I write about library is

cpd23 Week One - Blogging

So, week one of cpd23 begins, and participants are asked to set up a blog, if they don't already have one. Well, I've had this blog (in it's previous incarnation as "Jennie Law" for four years, so I think I'm good for the "setting up and getting used to blogging" part of Thing One :) I set this blog up originally as just somewhere to share the interesting things I found around the internet, with no real expectation of many others finding or reading it (and hence very little thought about a good name). At the time, there were only one or two other law librarians that I knew of blogging, so it didn't seem like it would be something long term, but for that moment, it felt good to be able to share some random thoughts with other law librarians, and to be able to learn from their blogs. I've stuck with it, despite a few periods of thinking "I've got nothing to say!" (and then finding a month or so later that I suddenly had a flood

Where are the UK Librarian blogs?

In response to various posts wondering about the strange lack of UK library / librarian blogs, I thought I’d have a look for myself to see where they’re all hiding. I did a search on Google Blogs, just using the words “ uk ” and “librarian”, and looked for posts published ‘anytime’, which gave me 24 pages of blog listings. This included spam blogs, duplicate postings, and various sites including ‘ uk ’ in the text of a link they’d posted. I learned a few things in the process. Lots of blogs post occasionally about librarians, without necessarily being written by librarians. If a blogger doesn't fill out their location information, it can be quite hard to work out where they're based without having to read a few posts and look for cultural references. “ UK ” also means "University of Kentucky ” ( See? ). There are quite a few interesting English language library bloggers, but they're not on this list 'cos they ain't in the UK. There really doesn’t