A Place of Sense

England is a place full of interesting place names. Like the language itself, places are a wonderful soup of Germanic, Celtic, Scandinavian, and French names with actual English names thrown into the mix. It's ripe for humor.

This delightful book takes many places names and give us alternate meanings. Often these are based on homophones or alternate meanings or pronunciations of the same letters. Short or long -- they are hilarious!

In being so similar to The Book of Liff, this volume may struggle. Its twist is not to give obscure place names to what was previously an indefinable quality or factor of everyday life, but to take a regular place name that can be easily mispronounced, or given one of two emphases in saying it out loud, and allowing that to cause an imaginary definition. So Aspull is ''like a leg-pull, but ruder", Baldock is "the small chute that catches the balls in sequence as they are ejected from the National Lottery machine", Ickleford is a small model, like the Ka, and so on. Some entries really take some working on, but then "cruckmeole" the joke hits. The previous Books of Liff had the comedy of recognition provided by two humorous masters, and this doesn't, but while it's got more than a few duff entries it is worth considering. A great Poe joke, amongst others, makes me slightly more keen on giving four stars.

This is a clever book. The premise being that a simple analysis of a place name can bring humour and entertainment.
I thought it would be a high brow book about the derivatives of place names from Norse, Norman and Anglo Saxon words for copse, meadow and ford.
However, it was a variation of this with comic overtones.
It is a complete send up. For example ACHA n: Western Scottish dialect for a sneeze.
Going through the A to Z of place names it demonstrates a bright intellect, clever wit and a classic play on words. A little bit of bawdy humour and inference, but never a carry on style of pun and toilet humour.
There is also a mindset and a frame of working that means the same logic is applied throughout.
The best aspect of the book is the familiar towns and village known to you and the amazing definitions that are given that bring a smile to you more often than note. Some are even laugh out loud funny.
It will please more people than not and should not be seen as offensive. Locally funny names are often joked about in terms of their origin. But here the author doesn’t always go with the obvious but takes 10 lines of rich prose to say the same thing with side-splitting fun. Elsewhere an educated mind draws on other knowledge to influence the etymology of words used as place names, to reduce the reader to fits of laughter.
A simple idea brilliantly co-ordinated into a very worthwhile book. Some of these like Crap Towns seem to have a ready audience. However, this is a small book that will have something for everyone and will please most who receive it as a gift or buy it for themselves.

A very funny and entertaining book, full of humour and fantastic alternative meaning of places.
Really entertaining and recommended.
Many thanks to Netgalley and Matador