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Last weekend, I was in Omaha for the annual Berkshire-Hathaway Shareholders Meeting. Not that I am a shareholder of Berkshire-Hathaway, but simply because I was curious to see two nonagenarian financial wizards hold forth in front of 20,000 enthusiastic fans for a whole day. I wasn't disappointed, though I must confess that I didn't understand half of what Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were saying about value investing.
Since I was staying in Council Bluffs and the meeting was held at the CHI Health Center across the river in Omaha, I had to go back and forth across the Missouri River several times, so I became curious about the relationship between the two cities. I asked a taxi driver from Council Bluffs, who was born and grew up there, what local people thought of the twin cities. "We're the one with all the problems," he said. "So much so that they call us Counciltucky.
I had never heard of that word before, and when I looked it up, I didn't like what I found, because it attaches serious stigma to the people of Council Bluffs.
I told some friends about it, and they said, yes, and we have "Pennsyltucky" too. But when I looked that up, it wasn't nearly so demeaning as "Counciltucky". It basically just means Pennsylvania minus the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia metropolitan areas.
Curious about the apparent meaning of the suffix "-tucky", I looked up the etymology of "Kentucky", and this is what I found:
Sometime before 1769, Botetourt and successor counties of Virginia Colony whose geographical extent was south of the Ohio/Allegheny rivers beyond the Appalachian Mountains became known to European Americans as Kentucky (or Kentucke) country named for the Kentucky River, a tributary of the Ohio River in east central Kentucky. The precise etymology of the name is uncertain.
One theory sees the word based on an Iroquoian name meaning "(on) the meadow" or "(on) the prairie" (cf. Mohawk kenhtà:ke, Seneca gëdá'geh (phonemic /kɛ̃taʔkɛh/), "at the field").
Another theory suggests a derivation from the term Kenta Aki, which could have come from an Algonquian language, in particular from Shawnee. Folk etymology translates this as "Land of Our Fathers". The closest approximation in another Algonquian language, Ojibwe, translates as "Land of Our In-Laws", thus making a fairer English translation "The Land of Those Who Became Our Fathers".[18] In any case, the word aki means "land" in most Algonquian languages.
A third theory states that the name Kentucky may be a corruption of the word Catawba, in reference to the Catawba people who inhabited Kentucky.
(source)
..[T]he name is of Iroquois or Shawnee origin, perhaps a Wyandot (Iroquoian) word meaning "meadow" (compare Seneca geda'geh "at the field"); the original use in English seems to have been the river name; the native use perhaps was first in reference to a village in what now is Clark County known in Shawnee as Eskippakithiki.
(source)
Unclear. Possibly from an Iroquoian word meaning "prairie"; compare Mohawk kenhtà:ke (“the meadow”), Seneca gëdá'geh (“at the field”).
(source)
Maybe "-tucky" means "prairie", "meadow", or "field", but we cannot be sure of that. In any event, it wouldn't match the implied meaning in "Counciltucky". Rather, what we seem to have is the detachment of the final portion of the name of a state that people think of as populated by hillbillies, hicks, and so forth. They they stick this pejorative pseudo-suffix on the first part of the name of whatever place or group they wish to deprecate, and voilà! you have a new, negative, stereotypical cognomen. It's all petty prejudice and silly irrationality.
Still and all, I often wonder what the residents of twin cities everywhere think of each other — Dallas-Fort Worth, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Urbana-Champaign, and so on and so forth.
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