A Farewell to Arms: the ‘Greening’ of American Apartment Names

Though behavioral studies have shown that territoriality is fundamental in the animal kingdom, the attachments that render space into place are of a distinct species. The act of conferring a name upon a place remains peculiarly human-the work of homo nominans, Man the Namer. The names on our globe are as rich and varied as the dimensions and configurations of the places themselves, for a person can define his space as broadly as American (two continents) or as narrowly as the street name of a suburban cul-de-sac. Nor must boundaries be official: one person's interpretation of "God's Country" might be California while another's is the area of farmland in Illinois called Egypt by locals.