It couldn’t possibly be true, a place named for Dwayne Johnson a.k.a “The Rock”, the professional wrestler and actor?
This guy had more than 15 million Twitter followers! That indicated someone of immense popularity, for sure. But would someone name an entire town for him?
Meanwhile, Down in Georgia
No, of course not. The Rock in Georgia had no association with Dwayne Johnson and I never figured that was a realistic possibility. The weird juxtaposition of a professional wrestler and a populated place with the same name simply amused me. Johnson didn’t have any association with the state or the town as far as I could determine.
Nonetheless I never considered that The Rock — the town — had anything to do with the Chick-fil-A fast food restaurant chain either. Nonetheless it did, as improbable as that sounded.
The Rock in Georgia associated with The Rock Ranch, and:
“The Rock Ranch is a beautiful 1,500 acre cattle ranch located about an hour south of Atlanta in Upson County. It’s a place where families, school groups and even businesses can come to enjoy what we call ‘agritourism.’ The Rock Ranch is owned by Chick-fil-A founder S. Truett Cathy and dedicated to ‘Growing Healthy Families’!”
S. Truett Cathy and kin are no strangers to controversy. The Rock Ranch held a strong opinion on which Healthy Families it hoped to Grow.
The Others
My tangential thought process led me to consider other placenames beginning with the definite article. It had to be unusual, I considered. Then I realized it may not have been all that rare even if it wasn’t the norm. A simple visit to any list of nations around the world demonstrated that quickly.
- THE Bahamas
- THE Congo (Republic of, and Democratic Republic of)
- THE Gambia
- Saint Vincent and THE Grenadines
The rule of thumb seemed to center upon entities named for something like a river or a group of islands. They included the definite article more than other situations. The Grenadines portion of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines fascinated me. I guess that’s because Saint Vincent and the Grenadines included only a portion of the Grenadines.
The largest island of the Grenadines, Carriacou, was actually a dependency of Grenada. Saint Vincent and the Grenadines had to settle for the second largest island, Bequia. Perhaps they should change it to Saint Vincent and Some of the Grenadines? It seemed like false advertising.
One often encounters THE Netherlands and THE Philippines too. I suppose while I’m at it I could add THE United States and THE United Kingdom. There used to be THE Ukraine. However, that began to shift to Ukraine by itself after becoming an independent state in 1991.
Nonetheless I think the only two nations where the definite article would always be capitalized would be The Bahamas and The Gambia (vs. the United States and the United Kingdom, where lowercase would be acceptable in many circumstances). It all gets so confusing.
In the United Kingdom
I looked for instances of THE attached to placenames in many areas. As a result, I found no nation with a greater prevalence than the United Kingdom. There must be hundreds of them. Some were quite remarkable such as The Burf, The Folly, The Glack, The Mumbles, and The Shoe. The best of course traced to several places named The Butts. That’s because 12MC couldn’t resist another opportunity for lowbrow humor. This would be an appropriate time to turn on the video of Da Butt for some inspiration.
Some Context
Many British placenames that sounded odd to the rest of us derived from things that made complete sense in their original context. English Heritage [link no longer works] provided a logical explanation for The Butts:
“An archery butts is an area of land given over to archery practise in which one or more artificially constructed mounds of earth and stone were used as a target area. The name originally applied to the dead marks or targets themselves but the earthen platforms on which the targets were placed also became known as butts… Archery butts can be recognised as field monuments through their earthwork mounds but documentary sources allow the best identification of archery butts, usually through place-names eg. Butt Hills… Archery butts are associated with the use and practise of the longbow which was in part responsible for England’s military power throughout the medieval period.”
Thus, many of The Butts descended from archery fields. However, some did not: “The Middle English word ‘butt’ referred to an abutting strip of land, and is often associated with medieval field systems“. In Britain, The Butts might associate either with archery or with an odd leftover land remnant.
Even More
The Gazetteer of British Place listed two specific location of The Butts, one in Glamorgan, South Wales (map) and the other in Hampshire, England (map), although other sources listed more.
I noticed something interesting next to The Butts in Hampshire, Jane Austen’s House Museum. Jane Austen (1775–1817) resided here during the latter part of her life. Here she wrote the novels Mansfield Park, Emma and Persuasion. She may have also revised drafts of Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice and Northanger Abbey here as well. Thus one could say a famous author gazed upon The Butts quite regularly.
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