Discussion Main / LondonEnglandSyndrome

I feel like this trope page should mention how often this occurs in Latin America, too. Lots of places in former Spanish colonies are named after Spanish cities, e.g., Córdoba, Argentina. Sometimes there's some attempt to distinguish them, as with Cartagena, Spain, which was the namesake for the much larger Cartagena de Indias, Colombia. The "de Indias" is supposed to denote that it's the one in "the Indies", or the Americas, but it's usually just called "Cartagena".

And then you've got the many places that weren't necessarily named for a Spanish city, but have the same name due to Spanish colonizers drawing on the same pool of Catholic motifs: San Juan (Argentina/Puerto Rico), Santa Fe (Argentina/New Mexico), Santa Cruz (Bolivia/California), etc.

This article is an absolute disaster. I'm reading the examples and I have no idea what people are listing. Is this trope for people confusing towns with similar names? Is it for people unnecessarily clarifying straightforward place names? Is it for just straightforward listings of every single time someone added the country after a well-known city? This needs massive cleanup

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Unclear Description, started by Angeldeb82 on Oct 5th 2012 at 12:13:13 AM

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Ambiguous Name, started by Merseyuser1 on Mar 13th 2017 at 8:31:47 PM

Would adding South Gloucestershire (the county) vs Southern Gloucestershire (the southern part of Gloucestershire, a separate county from South Gloucestershire) and:

• Lincolnshire, England borders North Lincolnshire and North-East Lincolnshire (these are separate counties from Lincolnshire, and not just geographic designations).

I don't want to Edit War over this stuff, so feel free to add it in yourself, since my geography knowledge is okay but this could be controversial to some people in geography terms.

"In China over 200 cities share names with the prefecture they belong to. What's worse is they (as the prefecture capital) divide themselves into districts (each district on equal level of counties), and all-city institutions are combined with prefecture governments—so the prefecture is called "prefecture-level city" despite it's 10~1000 times larger than urban area of the central city, creating confusion even among locals."

I have spent a good five minutes trying to figure out what this means and have only managed to give myself a headache. It would probably help a lot if some kind soul could edit in an example.

Sorry, I don't know how to formulate that in the main article (my English is not so good), but : "the -upon- always comes before the name of a river that goes through the city" : it's true in the French examples "Saint-Marie-Sur-Aube and Saint-Marie-Sur-Orne" : "sur" means "upon", and you can tell it's in the Aube/Orne department because the Aube/Orne department is named after the river as well.

Where you say 'The Other Wiki has a list of the most commonly used city names' (link to Wikipedia), it's the most commonly used place names in the US page. There's a difference. Please change either the page link or the text to something like 'The Other Wiki has a list of the most common place names in the USA'. Also, though the city is called Newcastle-upon-Tyne, no-one calls it that. Even the BBC and all the weather programmes write it as just 'Newcastle'. Where does the name come from? When, after the Romans got kicked out for the last time, castles were being built we named the place it was in 'new castle', for obvious reasons. There was one just by the Tyne. So, 'New castle, upon the Tyne'. This got condensed, then people settled and the city expanded. Berwick-upon-Tweed is known as that because we'd otherwise not know where the place was (we know where the Tweed is, but not the town. Like how you say Miamisburg, Ohio.) And Stratford-upon-Avon is that because 1) Shakespeare lived there and 2) there's another Stratford.

Also, another confusion: Saying "I'm from Halifax, near Manchester". Brits know what you're on about (North of England), Yanks think you're Canadian (from Nova Scotia - or, believe it or not, New Scotland!).

"Unfortunately, this results in some confusion and frustration for many Americans." I don't really get this line. It comes at the opening of a paragraph that describes how Americans (and consequently, American media) tend to indicate what state/country they mean when naming towns and cities. At the bottom of the paragraph it says that "foreigners" (presumably those not from North America) find this jarring and annoying... So isn't this trope about something that those not from the U.S. find annoying? What exactly are Americans having trouble with, seeing as how this article describes an American (and probably Canadian) custom? Should the sentence read "Unfortunately, this results in some confusion and frustration for many non-Americans"?