17 November 2004

[pdx_life] Are You Ready For Your New, Fashionable District Name?

In case you haven't noticed, the wags and the fashionable set are coming up with new names for familiar places.

I'm not just talking about the awkwardly-named "Pearl District", or the non-historically named "West End". We're really going fashionable.

The area between NW Lovejoy St and the Willamette River has been loosely termed "NoLo". The insiders also know that it's short for North of Lovejoy.

The venerable north Portland peninusla is getting the hip, with-it term of "NoPo".

I think this is a cool trend. In keeping with stealing style from other places, slapping it on our own town and pretending that just by putting it here we've changed it in some ineffable way (hey, Mayor! Chicago called! They want thier motto back!). If stuffy old New York City can dress up the area South of Houston St by calling it SoHo or the Triangle Below Canal by calling it TriBeCa, why not our dowdy old lady? I think we can all look forward to seeing tres namechanges in all of our 'hoods! Visualise the glottal stop at the studly cap and follow along:

Hawthorne hipsters? Welcome to HaTho!

Gateway commuters? Your home should look less drab when you think of it as GaWa!

Mill Park-ers? Welcome to MiPa!-now even Baja Gresham can be cool!

Nobody still has any idea what to do with C.E.N.T.E.R.

Irvingtonians walk tall in IrTo.

Laurelhursters keep it real in LaHu.

Sellwood still doesn't have enough class and has to keep its old name.
Westmoreland can however adopt the quite slimming WeMo.

And the exurbs can join in too! A cow-orker moved recently from Tanasbourne to Lake Oswego. Although we can now say that he moved from TaeBo[1] to LaOs. Altho' he doesn't speak one SE Asian language....


[1] Yes, I know there's no e between the T and the B in Tanasbourne. It's artistic license. I can do this!

2 comments:

Betsy said...

Heh - I posted about this (to me, annoying) trend a month ago in a much more snarky, cynical way. (Hey, it's what I do...)

My final conclusion? GaMeNow.

Anonymous said...

I'm just excited to live in Goose Hollow! GoHo!
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