But my point was the opposite: not being from there one "regular" person (with regular meaning with no specific interests in geography) can't expect to know more than a couple of those cities/state combos. The ones we all know by the media, the news... The globally famous ones. And even those, the state could be tricky for lots of people (Las Vegas is known worldwide... but I bet my lung most people could not say right it's in Nevada).
In that scenario, the game isn't challenging and fun, it's just frustrating. That's why I turned to the option of "guessing". It was like if I was playing to get in the minds of the people that founded towns back in time in the states. How would they name the new settled place.
And it turns there's some fun things to learn doing so:
- How far to the north Spanish-like names were found. I always though that influence would had been restricted way more to the south (that was fur for me, as it's like part of my country history that I just missed)
- How many Moscows there's on the USA! I would not imagine how weird it could be for some proud USA citizen being in the darkest times of Cold War saying "I'm from Moscow" when meeting somebody.
- One can try to imagine how it was the landscape os some places, how impacting could be some trait to put it in the same of the town (Springfield as the most common example, but there's lot more related to landscape)
- Or about the expectations of those first settlers. To name some places "... city" and being small towns under 200 citizens. Certainly, it didn't worked as the founder's expected.
- Or the opposite "...towns" that ended being multi-hundred-thousand citizens metropolis.
- How they expanded the most "pious" settlers, with all those biblical names to their towns
- Or the black humor of some names, like the Snowflake i mentioned before.
And so many more
It's also interesting to see how this method was way less successful in the west. Not just because they are less towns there; but because the more to the west, the less Euro-centric are the names.
BTW, you have to recognize that your capitals aren't easy at all. At least from an European point of view. We are used (not everywhere, but in lots of countries) to geographical areas named as their most important cities; because that has been a process of centuries. The settling of USA is more recent and way different: choosing a convenient capital for a new territory and later happened than other cities flourished a lot more when the pass of time turned them be placed in more strategical locations (simplifying OFC). Almost no capital is either named as the state not their biggest and renowned city (in lots of cases the capital isn't even in the top 10; Vermont one really shocked me)
Regards
