Tag: Montana
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King of Portmanteau
If Portmanteau was a nation, Albert J. Earling would have been its king. By now most readers understand Twelve Mile Circle’s fascination with portmanteaus. It’s the birth of creative new words resulting from the smashing together two or more existing words. Previous articles dealing with this device included Mardela to Delmar and Dueling Portmanteau Placenames.…
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US State Surnames
The second installment on surnames involves instances that match U.S. state names. The rules are much the same as the national surnames discussion. The source remains Frequently Occurring Surnames from Census 2000 and complete matches are better than partial matches. Once again one should feel free to follow along at home using a shared Google…
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Infrequent Crossings, US-Canada
Twelve Mile Circle loves its borders, and probably none more than the border between Canada and the United States (for instance). The statistics are impressive: 119 border crossings; 39,254,000 trips by Canadians into the United States in 2009; and nearly $500 million in international trade passing every day on the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario…
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Least Visited U.S. Counties
Of all the 3,143 counties and county-equivalents in the United States, which are the least visited? I don’t think there is any definitive way to know for certain. As a proxy, however, I examined the 20 least visited counties for the Lower 48 states listed on the Mob Rule county counting website as of June…
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I’ve Barely Been There
I’ve been to all of the 50 United States as is true with several others of you who read Twelve Mile Circle regularly. In fact, that’s what got me started on the strange hobby of County Counting. I ran out of things to count so I had to break the individual states into their sub-units…
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Southernmost Northern Hemispheric Glacier
My trip to Alaska got me thinking about snow, ice and glaciation. There were glaciers aplenty on the Kenai Peninsula but that’s not unexpected at sixty degrees north of the equator. Where, I wondered, was the southernmost glacier in the northern hemisphere? It’s not the first time my mind has wandered in this basic direction.…
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Shortest River… or Not
What is a river, exactly? In all seriousness, what differentiates a river from a creek, a brook, a run or some of the other watercourses mapped on Toponymia? Clearly it comes down to size and volume. But where does one draw the line between what should be called a “river” and what should not? So…