What’s in a name?

After a discussion of the origins of the name Kentucky, familiar ground for most of us natives, Robert Morgan has this to say in Boone: A Biography (Algonquin, 2007)

Some words have a resonance, a color, and are memorable even before we know what they mean. We love to say them just to feel them in the air and on our tongue. Some words have a peculiar rightness and catch on like a bit of poetry. Kanta-ke is such a term, and people have never tired of saying it since it was first heard by whites in the middle of the eighteenth century. There is a symmetry to the word, to the balance of vowels and consonants, beginning with the k sound and ending with the k sound. And of course the name was thought to have an etymological and semantic rightness too. Whatever they called it, those who sought Kentucky already saw it as a mythic, Edenic place. Whatever the entymology of the word, Kentucky certainly seemed like the land of the future to Boone and Findley, and many other explorers of the time. [pp. 90-91]

Puts me in mind of what Moses Austin had to say about those poverty-stricken settlers running mad for Kentucky. Sometimes our mythology is destructive.

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