Since Manchester and Mancunians came up here recently, I thought it would be a good time to repost this from Laudator Temporis Acti, quoting John Hines, “The Roman Name for Manchester,” in G.D.B. Jones, Roman Manchester (1974), pp. 159-163 (at 160, notes omitted):
The name MAMUCIUM has found its way into the Ordnance Survey Map of Roman Britain, and (as the received version) into such authoritative works as Crawford and Richmond’s ‘The British Section of the Ravenna Cosmography’, and Rivet and Jackson’s ‘The British Section of the Antonine Itinerary’, which came out in 1949 and 1970 respectively.
The form MAMUCIUM, then, has as strong manuscript support as has MANCUNIUM, although popular tradition still holds to the latter. When one considers what the popular mind is capable of making of names (‘Manchester’ was in Camden’s day locally supposed to be the ‘city of Men’, or of the ‘good burghers and true’ who fought back the Danes) this particular consideration gives the received form no real advantage. Those who accept the form MAMUCIUM as the original Latinised Celtic name have the problem of finding a satisfactory derivation. Indeed this did not prove too difficult, since the word MANS, MAMM, is to hand. This means in Irish or Welsh ‘breast’, ‘mother’ or ‘womb’. To the specialist scholar, then, the name means ‘breast-like hill’ and is compared to CICUTIO, a place-name with similar meaning of a fort sited in Wales (Y Gaer).
You can (I hope) read Hines’ further discussion at Google Books; I suppose it’s unlikely that “Mamucian” is going to replace “Mancunian” in popular use, however weighty the scholarly arguments.
Tit Hill. There have been worse place names …
The Grand Tetons come to mind. Perhaps “Hills = breasts” is one of those human universals wired into our DNA. I heard spontaneous versions of this starting when I was about 12.
I recall reading somewhere about the unfortunate tendency of uncultured European pioneers in the New World to bestow names on landmarks which were not altogether genteel, and the bowdlerising efforts of their less manly descendants. The two that stick in my mind are the twin hills originally called “Maggie’s Bubs”, apparently now known simply as “The Maggies”, and “Dog Prick Point”, nowadays called “Dog Point”, despite the lack of any obvious overall resemblance to Man’s Best Friend.
The Grand Tetons come to mind.
Also:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paps_of_Anu
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paps_of_Jura
the name means ‘breast-like hill’ and is compared to CICUTIO, a place-name with similar meaning of a fort sited in Wales
This perplexed me, as the obvious Welsh cognate would be cig, which actually means “flesh, meat.” However, the ever-glorious GPC does indeed say that cig is cognate to Old Irish cích, glossed “teth, bron”, i.e. “nipple, breast.” What this curious semantic shift tells us about my Brythonic forebears I prefer not to contemplate. Perhaps it is, instead, a reflection on the Goidels.
Sharp-eyed Jouna Pyysalo spotted a Vedic compound for ‘breastbone’ containing an apparent cognate root, so the shifts would be ‘chest’ > ‘female breast’ and ‘chest’ > ‘meat’. The latter seems a stretch, but there you have it.
It smacks of cannibalism to be honest.
Recently I’ve been reading some 17th century sources and it struck me how relatively common and widespread it was.
There were periodic famines in which desperate people resorted to cannibalism. There were wars and garrisons of besieged cities often ended up eating human corpses. There were shipwrecked sailors who had time-honored tradition of eating each other.
It was all accepted as unfortunate part of human life and condition.
And it appears that main indignation at cannibal practices of savage tribes was that they practiced cannibalism incorrectly – they weren’t starving, they weren’t besieged, they weren’t shipwrecked. They had no justifiable excuse to eat people.
@SFReader: And I think that indignation is quite right. There is a huge difference between endocannibals eating their dead (often in conditions of extremity) versus murdering people in order to eat them. The Fore people in New Guinea famously practiced routine funerary cannibalism, which Western missionaries and colonialists strongly discouraged but did not use military force to stamp out.
I thought we had been discussing Mams and Maiden Paps and so on quite recently, but now I think about it, it must have been somewhere else.
Sheba’s Breasts are two peaks on one side of Ezulwini Valley. The rock formations are named after the legendary beauty and mysterious Queen of Sheba from Ethiopia, who supposedly seduced King Solomon. The author J. Rider Haggard, who traveled through Swaziland in the 1880s, was inspired by the peaks and it is believed that he wrote his famous “King Solomon’s Mines”. Legend says that Sheba’s Breasts are the site of King Solomon’s mines.
https://www.senseafrica.co.uk/walking-and-hiking/climbing-shebas-breasts/
In the 1880s still? In zoology, the years of obsession were earlier and gave us Mastodon, the other Mastodon which was eventually renamed Mastodonsaurus, and the mastoid process of the human skull.
And Mastodonsaurus is named for the shape of a badly weathered tooth. Better-preserved teeth look nothing like that.
I recall reading somewhere about the unfortunate tendency of uncultured European pioneers in the New World to bestow names on landmarks which were not altogether genteel, and the bowdlerising efforts of their less manly descendants.
My favorite example is Rooster Rock, of the same-named state park in Oregon, whose characteristic narrow protruding shape has very little in common with a rooster. Apparently in that particular case the original name was in fact a literal translation of the native name (the natives being of course even less cultured than the colonizers).