NAME THIS HOUSE!

Otago Daily Times, Issue 20318, 28 January 1928, Page 4

NAME THIS HOUSE!

If you are suddenly asked to suggest names for six new houses it makes you a little more observant in your study of titles printed on garden gates, And you will, perhaps, be amazed to note the eccentricity of the same in various neighbourhoods (says a writer in the Newcastle Weekly Chronicle). Men settling down after the war seem to have wished to express themselves as slangily as possible, in foreign terms, or more often in words suggesting rest and peace. So we get Dunroamin’, Sum ’Opes, Pro Tern, Trcs Bon, Mon Abri, Our Dug Out, Desire, Query, and Journey’s End. A crop of every kind of name containing “ Home in it is popular, also the Latin form of Duke Domura. The names suggesting rest are varied, some rather beautiful, some too high flown and nonsensical. A few found in one particular neighbourhood are Lazyland, Arcadia, Eirvana, Lullaby (with Picciola next door!). Harmony, Placilla, Bide a Wee, Rest-a-wyle (and many variations of “Rest,” such as Rest-harrow, including simply The Rest), Pax, and Eventide, with two or, perhaps, greater beauty, Green Pastures and Orrass Valley. Size—or rather lack of size—is a feature in the house-names of to-day, for comparatively few mansions are being built. So we find Arks and Noah’s Arks, Kosi Kots, Huts, Hutches, Nests (sometimes belonging to robins, wens, or swallows!), Nutchells, and Acorn Cottages, and in one case The Matchbox by way of variation. Literary people may choose book titles. Stella Maris and Cranford are happier examples than some. Characters taken from plays and fairy stories also appear. Wendy, Tink-a-beii, and possibly Puss-in-Boots, and Hop-o’-My Thumb were chosen to please children. Queer, The Orange Girl, De Gnome, Penguin, The Bird, and The Wigwam are much too bizarre to please most people. Sunrise, Sunlit, Sunset, Morning Dawn, and The Stars _ may suggest that their owners are poetical, but there is a slight ring of affectation about such names as Ye Olde House at Home and Ye Old Tilehouse. But Ye Old Barn?, The Windmill, and Malthouses can be quite charming when suggesting origins of old buildings. Bruff, The Four W T inds, Windyhaugh are good names for the open hillside, and The Chimes for a house in an old-warld cathedral city. Still, when all is said and done, one grows a little weary of the form of self-expression that perpetrates itself in house-names. _ And to see plain Twenty-one painted in clear letters on a garden gate is a relief rather than otherwise.