Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2010 December 20

= December 20 =

"If you have a Gmail address, please supply that."
I'm not sure if I should post this here or on the computing desk, but whatever. Anyway, I'm filling out a form from Google and in the email field it says if you have a Gmail address, please supply that. I do have a gmail address, but I want to use my primary one, because it's the one I remember to check the most (and I hate gmail). Will it make a difference if I don't? 24.189.87.160 (talk) 08:24, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Given that you hate gmail, why not cancel that account and then fill in the form honestly? HiLo48 (talk) 08:36, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I own an Android phone, so I have to have a Google account. 24.189.87.160 (talk) 09:14, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * It says "please supply" it, not "you will go to Google-jail if you don't supply it." Use whatever e-mail address you want.  Cheers.  Haus Talk 08:42, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * You can of course have all your Gmail automatically forwarded to whatever address you like. Click on "settings" in your Gmail page and follow the prompts.--Shantavira|feed me 09:50, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm guessing that they just want to integrate whatever service you're filling a form out for with your Google account. As has been said above - if you want to use another one, they're not going to send men with sticks round to beat your Google email address out of you. ~ mazca  talk 10:45, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * OK then, I guess it won't affect the outcome. 24.189.87.160 (talk) 11:07, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * If you're a heavy user of Google services, you really ought to use a gmail address. A number of their services are set up to use gmail addresses as unique identifiers for people -- they have pretty good security and there is nothing else widely available that doesn't raise privacy concerns. Looie496 (talk) 17:51, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Unless the "primary" email that you use is hotmail, then people might come over to beat you with sticks, and I might be one of them. ;) Vespine (talk) 03:03, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
 * What will you do to the poor soul with an AOL account?  Acroterion  (talk)  04:46, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Place names
Please excuse my ignorance, as I am not American, but I would like to know why is it that the settlers in the New world committed genocide against the native inhabitants, an example of which is the Indian Wars, and the Trail of Tears, but then went on to name so many of their cities and states in the language of the Native Americans, e.g. Cincinnati, Seattle, Saskatchewan, Chicago, to name but a few, I do not understand this contradiction, please can this be explained to me because at present I view this as, to use an analogy, the Nazi’s Kill all the Jews and then say ‘’Okay guys now everyone has to speak Yiddish’’. It just does not make any sense to me at all. Thank you. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 195.2.26.146 (talk) 13:50, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Part of the answer is that the European use of Native American place names began during (ostensibly) peaceful trading operations. See e.g. Fur_trade_in_North_America. SemanticMantis (talk) 14:52, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * First there was no great overaching genocide against the Indians. There was living side by side, trading, inter-marrying, fighting together with and fighting against, hating, respecting. Chief Seattle was a respected leader, while Pontiac, Tecumseh, Blackhawk were respected enemies. Chicago was a trading site - why not call it what your native wife was calling it (Jean Baptiste Point du Sable). Cincinnati is not Indian but Roman. All manner of newly encountered animals, plants, cultural items, landforms were called by the Europeans some version of the name Indians called them (List of English words from indigenous languages of the Americas). The same applies to place names: List of placenames of indigenous origin in the Americas. Much easier to travel to the next village to trade beads for corn if you try to use the same name for the village than if you try to teach your trading partner a new term you just made up (not to mention trying to talk about the wierd animals you encountered (should we call that thing a masked dogmonkey or a raccoon?) 75.41.110.200 (talk) 14:59, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * While the effects of white settlers' actions may have been genocidal, there was not an intentional campaign of genocide, like the one that the Nazis waged against the Jews of Europe. White attitudes toward the native peoples of the Americas have always been complex: an odd mixture of contempt, fear, respect, and even admiration.  Yes, some of those attitudes are self-contradictory, but attitudes need not be rational.  Part of the appeal of the New World for many settlers was that it was new and full of exotic appeal.  Those who wished to promote the settlement of Ohio or Missouri may have (even if subconsciously) adopted those names because they were grander and more exotic than something like New Virginia or New Lancashire.  These counterexamples bring to mind the contrary case, so common where I live in (what could be less exotic?) New England.  The settlers of New England were not looking for a break from the Old World.  They wanted to recreate England in a new locale, minus what they saw as wicked Satanic things like bishops, St. Mary, and Christmas. So they named their chief town Boston, after the home town in Lincolnshire of many of the settlers.  They named the river that ran past it the Charles River, after their king.  And they gave surrounding settlements English placenames, such as Cambridge and Dorchester, or descriptive names, such as New Town (later Newton).  Marco polo (talk) 15:41, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, not everywhere in Massachusetts (Narragansett name Massachusêuck): List of place names in New England of aboriginal origin. :') 75.41.110.200 (talk) 15:57, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * The American genocide of Native Americans was never built on hatred. It was built on ignorance, and selfishness, and paternalism, and general assholery, but it lacked the element of hatred that fuels other genocides.  There wasn't really a concerted effort to eliminate the Native Americans out of a hatred for their culture.  It was more a case of the Native Americans had something the settlers wanted (land), the settlers were stronger, so they just took it.  They came from Europe, where Right of conquest was an entrenched part of International law.  Does this make any of the resulting genocide right or less wrong.  No, it does not.  But it does make it understandable why there was never an attempt to erase native American placenames from the map.  There was just never much animosity towards them, excepting in the "you have what I want, so I am going to just take it" sense.  -- Jayron  32  16:04, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * That is a rather sanitized version of history. Sure the genocide was politically and economically motivated, (Why else would government time and money be invested?) but many of the early white people in America clearly viewed the indians as sub-human savages to be exterminated like dangerous animals.


 * Here are some lovely examples from the correspondence of Lord Jeffery Amherst.(link). That page is about the plans to give smallpox infected blankets to the natives, but it also gives you a nice idea of their general feelings. APL (talk) 17:19, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * The claim that Amherst intentionally transmitted smallpox via infected blankets sounds questionable, since no doctor or scientist in the world at that time knew that there were germs, or that germs from sick people were the means of transmitting disease. Many decades later doctors derided the request of Ignaz Semmelweis that they wash their hands after dissecting diseased corpses and before delivering babies. How come in the late 18th century Amherst and other military officers understood the Germ theory of disease and yet he did not share this insight with the world, so they did not have to wait for Semmelweis, Pasteur and Koch to rediscover it in the mid to late 19th century? Between Amherst in the 1700's and Semmelweis in the 1840's, doctors did not know that infected matter on their hands, bandages, or instruments would transmit disease from patient to patient. Seems like a very curious disconnect. Edison (talk) 02:34, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Edison. First of all you didn't read the link, it includes first party sources discussing the infected blankets as a means of exterminating Indians (because hunting them with dogs was too expensive.) Secondly, germ theory wasn't around yet, but they had some idea of contagion. Quarantine and destroying infected blankets goes back a long way.  That goes back to before the black death.  There was even a theoretical backing to this practice. (Not that it needed one, the practical effect of re-using sick blankets should have been obvious to doctors who were observant.) Back then it was thought that smells and "bad air" had something to do with disease transmition, smells can certainly be captured by blankets.
 * The idea that the infected blanket scheme couldn't have been true because germ theory wasn't around yet is sadly one of those comforting myths we tell each other to convince ourselves that human nature isn't as bad as it really is. There is objective proof that they talked about doing it, that they believed it would work, and that they said they were going to do it. Presumably they went ahead and did it, but even if they didn't considering it is bad enough. APL (talk) 00:14, 24 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Well, it gives you a nice idea of Lord Jeffrey Amherst's feelings. I am not sure he represented everybody.  We can play battling sources, if you would like.  I can find just as many sources, contemporary to him, which have differing views towards Native Americans.  It would serve little purpose to that, now would it?  The point is not to say that the people who participated in the genocide of Native Americans are to be absolved of even one iota of their guilt.  They are not.  It is only to answer the question, which is why all traces of Native American names were not erased.  The answer is that not everyone universally hated all Native Americans, and not everyone wanted to erase their culture from history.  -- Jayron  32  17:27, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I can agree with that, just not that the genocide was "never" based on hatred, because at some times and places it was clearly just as much hate based as any other genocide.


 * I guess what the question asker needs to understand is we're talking about events that unfolded over centuries, and over a huge area. APL (talk) 17:34, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * I'm not sure that using somebody else's place names is necessarily a sign of respect. Thinking up original place names is a pain in the ass.  Just look at what happened with the Spaniards when they were settling South America:  they had about half a dozen place names that they used dozens of times each.  There are Santa Marias and San Franciscos all over the place. Looie496 (talk) 17:48, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * The same phenomenon occurs in Australia. Our capital city Canberra and many other places have Aboriginal names - despite the policies of our forefathers causing today's Aboriginals to be by far the most disadvantaged group of Australians.
 * The full-blood Aboriginals of Tasmania were completely wiped out (they survive only in mixed-blood descendants) - the only example of successful total genocide in world history, afaik - yet there are many Aboriginal place names in Tasmania.
 * Pick at random any Australian organisation that supports physically or intellectually disabled people, and it will have a 90% chance [OR] of having an Aboriginal name. I've never understood why that particular (no doubt well-meaning) tradition exists, as it seems to be making a link that doesn't exist, and serves only to further entrench negative attitudes towards Aboriginals in general, something they can well do without.  --   Jack of Oz   [your turn]  20:13, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Gee, I've had a lot to do with Australian disability services bodies over the years, and never noticed that before, but you're absolutely right. Interesting social psychology at work. HiLo48 (talk) 02:37, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

As noted above, you can't really compare the Holocaust to the whatever-you-want-to-call-it of American Indians. The Holocaust was a coordinated campaign over a few years led by a single party headed by a single person. When you look at the relationship between European-Americans and American Indians, you're talking about 400 years of very inconsistent history and all kinds of groups. Some Americans, like Ben Franklin, loved the Indians. Others, like Andrew Jackson, claimed to be friends with the Indians but promoted policies that nowadays can only be seen as racist. A lot of people saw the Indians as noble savages for whom the kindest thing to do would be to "civilize" them by eliminating their languages and cultures. No American president ever said, "Let's destroy all the Indians." Often, after one generation would fight off an Indian rebellion, the next generation would find the Indians' defiance heroic -- thus, Pontiac, Michigan, Osceola County, Florida and William Tecumseh Sherman, who ironically would fight against his generation's Indian rebellions in the Great Plains. -- Mwalcoff (talk) 00:18, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * There's a few different ways place names in America ended up being Native American based. Some date back so long that they had become familar. So the names of Chicago and Chattanooga, for example, don't indicate any particular interest in things native. They were just old long familar names for places. In early colonial times it was not uncommon to use native place names. But by the late 1700s native names had fallen out of fashion. Aside from the older, familar names, native names remained largely unpopular in frontier regions, where the actual conflicts between settlers and natives was going on. But, starting along the eastern seaboard in the early 1800s, where the natives had long been eliminated or rendered irrelevant and generally "out of view", a new fashion for native place names took root. It went hand-in-hand with a kind of nostalgic "noble savage" notion of a bygone era. For Americans who did not actually have first-hand experience with natives the names had an aura of the mysterious, strange, and mythological. Poets like Longfellow reinforced the fashion with poems like The Song of Hiawatha (1855). The first Massachusetts town to take a native name deliberately was Seekonk, in 1812. The fashion spread west in the wake of the frontier over the 19th century. One of its characteristics was a disinterest in where the names had actually been in use, and whether they even made sense. There was no problem with using, for example, a Cherokee name in Pennsylvania, or an Iroquois name in Louisiana. Consider places named after Native American individuals, like Powhatan, Pocohontas, Pontiac, and Osceola. They were used in places with no actual relation to the actual people. Many names were coined for their "color" rather than their actual meaning, if any. A great example of that is Pasadena, California (see History of Pasadena, California). Its name was deliberately chosen for "Indian color" without regard for local native languages. The name is a badly mangled adaptation of an Ojibwe phrase that the town founders claimed meant "key of the valley" or "crown of the valley" but actually means little more than "valley". Yet the Pasadena city seal still has a crown and a key on it (see File:City of Pasadena, California, seal.png). There's at least five other Pasadenas in the US, plus one in Canada and one in Australia--all named after the one in California. Anyway, that is the basic answer to the question. Leaving aside the question of whether there was deliberate genocide on the frontier--even if there was the widespread use of native place names largely came about afterwards--or at least from those parts of the country that were no longer on the frontier. The names of states is a good example of that. Many states have native names. Many were given by politicans in Washington DC, far from the frontier. Some, like Wyoming, were derived from languages used far away from long ago. Others, like Idaho, were coined for their color and are actually meaningless. There's a lot of information about this topic in George R. Stewart's book, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States. Pfly (talk) 02:12, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Thank you Pfly. That was a wonderful and informative answer.  -- Jayron  32  02:47, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Such names are one of the things that make America unique, not just "Europe, Part 2". And the attitude towards Native Americans was often NIMBY.  That is, they were admired in many ways, yet that didn't mean the were wanted nearby.  Thus, they were often moved along until they either fought back (and were killed) or ended up on land nobody wanted, because it was impossible to survive there. StuRat (talk) 21:17, 21 December 2010 (UTC)


 * How do "Such names ........ make America unique"? Doesn't this apply to Canada as well? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 222.152.15.198 (talk) 00:00, 22 December 2010 (UTC)


 * And that would be why I said "America" instead of "the United States", although most Native American names in the US and Canada are not duplicates of each other (although I can think of a few, like Tecumseh, Ontario and Tecumseh, Michigan). StuRat (talk) 08:04, 22 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Here's another, Chehalis River (Washington) and Chehalis River (British Columbia). Although it's not the norm, there are quite a few examples, especially in places like the Pacific Northwest, where many things were given names in Chinook Jargon, a trade pidgin once commonly used BC, WA, and OR. Pfly (talk) 12:08, 22 December 2010 (UTC)


 * In any case, what's the other option? Independent coinages are rare; mostly they'd be naming them after towns back home, and that ultimately causes confusion. Marnanel (talk) 14:26, 22 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Another place naming fad that started in the US in the mid & late 19th century was a "semi-coining" of names using terms that evoked the archaic, "old country", or "natural world", like glen, hurst, dale, burn (or bourne), mere, grove, etc; which were combined with other such terms, or personal names, or various other "attractively colorful" terms, resulting in "semi-coinages" like Woodburn, Glendale, Elmhurst, Palmdale, Hollywood, and so on in endless if rather boring variety. These names are not really "independent coinages" since they drew upon older place names, mostly from English and Scotland--but some of them were rather creative (though most were boring). Part of the fashion was a desire to make newly founded towns sound like pleasant places, useful for boosterism. Older descriptive compound names like Mill Creek or Bridgeport fell out of fashion for the same reason. There are also some interesting examples of more "creative" coinages, although they are much less common. In California lots of names were made to sound vaguely Spanish (though usually with little regard for actual Spanish), like Covina, Altadena, Isla Vista, and Coalinga (this last being "coaling", as in a train coaling station, +a--just enough to obscure the "coaling" origin and sound vaguely Spanish). Anyway, this kind of "semi-coining" for the purpose of color and boosterism continues to the present day, although the root word fashions have changed, as fashions do. Names with dale, hurst, wood, glen, etc, no longer sound especially novel and attractive. A fairly new master planned community near Seattle has decided on a name I find a bit cringeworthy: Harbour Pointe, in Mukilteo. Apparently the namers thought the British spelling "harbour" and the weird, vaguely "old English" spelling "pointe" would make people want to buy houses there. Of course there's no harbor or point to speak of at Harbour Pointe. Pfly (talk) 20:20, 22 December 2010 (UTC)


 * But if they get too creative, you end up with names like Monkey's Eyebrow. StuRat (talk) 02:49, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

Open source project or website
In a certain section of cv, I included some of my internet activities which looks like: "Internet: All browsing software, Open source project, Search Engines and e-mail." As for Open source project I am bit confused whether I should change it to Open source website. I contribute in wikipedia as well as in some other blogs. So should it be Open source project or Open source website. Thanks--180.234.55.142 (talk) 17:08, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Just say "Wikipedia contributor." There is no need to obfuscate it with fancy language.  And opensource isn't exactly the right term to describe what editors do at Wikipedia anyways.  Its related, but only so much.  Seriously, just say exactly what it is.  The more specific your resume, the better anyways.  -- Jayron  32  17:18, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I agree. Wikipedia is huge enough that you don't need to describe it. Just come right out and say "Wikipedia".
 * In any case, Putting "Open source project" without clarifying may imply that you're a software developer. APL (talk) 17:37, 20 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I also agree. The only sense in which I would understand the phrase "open source" as relating to Wikipedia is that the underlying Mediawiki software is an open source project. --ColinFine (talk) 00:10, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Criminals from the 1930;s
I have information about (2 gun) Hillary Henderson, a bank robber and criminal during the 30's. There is no information about him in wikipedia. He was from Arkansas, and is related to Merle Haggard through the Vallines family of Jasper, Newton County, Arkansas. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.218.87.197 (talk) 20:27, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Are there contemporary newspaper accounts of his exploits, so that it is easy to determine his notability? If so, you should create an article for him/her.  Googlemeister (talk) 20:37, 20 December 2010 (UTC)


 * Doing a Google search, I don't find anything on this person. Are you sure it's spelled correctly ? StuRat (talk) 21:00, 21 December 2010 (UTC)