Supplemental

Proper names got rather short shrift in Monday’s post (reference 1), so being up bright and early yesterday morning, I thought I would take a look around for Victoria flavoured words and names, calling at Le Petit Larousse, the 1928 edition of the OED, the London AZ, the Times Atlas of the World, Chambers Encyclopaedia, Wikipedia – ending up at Maurice Burton’s mammals (see reference 3) – and then converting what I found to an Excel worksheet, a worksheet which now has 123 data rows, of which 103 are for singletons and 20 are for collectives – with one such collective being all the Victoria Roads listed in the London AZ. So, in all, taking the statistics at reference 5 into account, we must have thousands of Victorian items – both quick and dead – in London alone. But the good news is that most people will only need to be aware of a very small number of them and I associate here to a chap whom I used to know who came from Portslade-by-Sea, whose knowledge of such matters was probably restricted to Queen Victoria, the Queen Vic public house, the Victoria Recreation Ground and Victoria Station – this last only because he sometimes failed to get off his train from Brighton at Clapham Junction.

Cutting the cake another way we have rows for something over 50 people and something over 50 roads, places and buildings, this cutting being the subject of the snap left.

People includes the daughter of our Queen Victoria, who went on to become the Empress of Germany, the actress Victoria Ruffo, various saints and Tomás Luis de Victoria, the composer from Spain who is given outings by the Ripieno Choir. See, for example, reference 2.

Fictional people is mainly ladies from romantic fiction, but there is also at least one god.

Buildings includes both the Old Vic and the Young Vic, together with a good number of other theatres.

The one animal is the Victorian genet, an African carnivore around the size of a large dog, an animal which is not recognised by Google but which is recognised by Bing (as genetta victoriae), the one adjective is Victorian and the one noun is Victoriana.

Miscellaneous includes things likes plums, carriages and a sort of woollen dress material.

Some entries are about ‘Queen Victoria’ rather than plain ‘Victoria’ and some are about the French version ‘Victoire’.

However, despite the profusion of Victoriana, the scope for confusion is considerably reduced by most of the entries usually coming with qualifiers: ‘Victoria Street’, ‘Victoria Park’ or ‘New Victoria Theatre’, with the street, park or theatre usually being clear from the context. Thinking of it another way, while there can easily be more than one bit of Victoriana at any one time and place, there is unlikely to be more than one street, park or theatre.

Which leaves the various people and places often called Victoria without qualification, for example the State of Victoria in Australia, Victoria Station in London, Victoria Beckham and some of the miscellanea, for example the plums and the carriages. But any confusion here will also, usually, be sorted out by context.

A computer would raise a reference number for every Victoria flavoured object it had on its books, indexing its file of objects by reference number, while the brain, spurning both names and reference numbers, would probably do it by position, would reserve a place for each, probably somewhere in the cerebral cortex. This Victoria is that place in the brain, a place which may or may not be so labelled, in some way or another. The brain would occasionally make mistakes about which of its many Victoria’s was the subject of discussion, usually jumping to the right place rather abruptly when it realised that it had made a mistake. That is to say, that it had reset its Victorian pointer from the Queen Victoria place to the State of Victoria place, with subsequent processing going much more smoothly. Rather as when looking at a bit of litter rocking in the wind, one sees a blackbird, which abruptly returns to being a crumpled crisp packet when one gets a bit closer.

PS: I was reminded by all this that Larousse, with its pictures, diagrams and proper names, fits into a good niche between our dictionaries and our encyclopaedias. A useful compromise, a compromise which I find a good companion to Maigret.

References

Reference 1: http://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/08/counting-words.html.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=long-dead+Spaniard+called+Victoria.

Reference 3: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/2014/11/dalhousie.html.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_(name). Wikipedia on Victorias past, present and imaginary.

Reference 5: http://www.avss.ucsb.edu/NameGB.HTM. University of California at Santa Barbara. From which I learn that Victoria accounted for around 1,500 female births in California in 2017, out of a total of 230,000. A bit less than 1% - but then 1% of the female population of London would be a few thousand.