What’s in a Name?

Tonight I had my first Mah Jongg class is Siler City, NC. For the record it was a very nice group of people. It was the first time I had ever even been to Siler City. Never even driven through it.

Siler City, was exactly as I excepted. A small NC town with an old downtown and some newer fast food and strip malls on the outskirts closer to the big road.

Siler City sits on the Western Edge of Chatham County, a fast growing county adjacent to the more well known triangle counties of Wake, Durham and Orange. Apparently there are under 10,000 people in Siler City. So my question is when it was named Siler City was it an aspirational naming or did they actually think of themselves as a city?

I grew up in Connecticut and as far as I was concerned the only real city in America was New York City. It was the all caps, definition of a CITY. Other places that were considered cities paled. Perhaps Chicago might be close to a city, but otherwise, no. My childish definition was if you could live easily in they city without ever learning how to drive a car, and if you could easily get a meal of any cuisine any hour of the day or night and if the buildings were so high that sometimes you could not see the top floors from the sidewalk, that was a city.

So how does Siler City fit in this picture? In a North Carolina there are 8 towns with city in their name. Besides Siler City, there is Cove City, Elm City, Forest City, Oak City, Surf City, Tabor City. Some of these I have never heard of. I have driven through Tabor City many times on the way to Pawleys Island and it is clearly misnamed. There is also Elizabeth City, which is probably the biggest of all these “cities, with a whopping 18,948 people. Hardly a big town in my book.

I feel like if you have a tree name followed by city it is just an oxymoron and how anything concerning the Surf could be mixed up with a city is just plain wrong. I hold no malice to these “cities,” but in the words of someone who might be from one of them, “A city we ain’t.”

New York City makes sense to differentiate it from the state of the same name. If we had a North Carolina City then maybe it could qualify for the city name.

I am not sure having a name that is too big for your britches has done any of these places any good, but it is probably too late to do anything about it. Just know that other places are snickering just a little when you call yourself a city and you don’t have one good Jewish deli.

Being a city is not the goal. Being a place full of nice people is way more important and I bet that all these “cities” have that, because they are North Carolinians. I think I need to make it my goal to visit every “city” in North Carolina, and since I have already been to Charlotte, Asheville, Winston Salem, Greensboro, Durham, Raleigh, Fayetteville it’s Time for Oak City. I’m not sure where you are, but I’ll drive through and get a biscuit. Because the one thing I can guess is you don’t have any knishes, but I bet you make a good biscuit.