Talk:Dukes County, Massachusetts
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
 |
Dukes County, Massachusetts is part of WikiProject Massachusetts, an effort to create, expand, and improve Massachusetts-related articles to a feature-quality standard. For more information on this project or to get involved see the WikiProject Massachusetts project page. |
| Start | rated as start-Class on the assessment scale |
[edit] Official Name
Wondering how to edit this U.S. County Entry?
The WikiProject U.S. Counties standards might help.
The accurate legal name is the County of Dukes County. This page should be altered to reflect that. There is no place called Dukes County in Massachusetts. A quick perusal of official government sites will show this.
- While this is probably moot as regards the page name, given the "common names" principle, I'm curious as to why it has this name, officially or otherwise? From the same people who brought us the Department of Redundancy Department? Alai 17:58, 27 May 2006 (UTC)
Such redundancy is certainly unusual for a county, but parallels municipalities having "City" in the plain name (e.g., the City of Atlantic City in New Jersey).
A clue to the redundancy can be found by examining the wording of the Acts establishing the various Counties. In all other cases, only the plain name is mentioned: Suffolk, Middlesex, Hampshire, and so on. So following a pattern strictly, the word "County" must appear again when mentioning the formal name of the government.
As in England, an unadorned county name was considered sufficient to designate an area. On legal documents, only the plain name of the county appears, followed by the abbreviation "ss." which seems to represent the term "Scilicet", translated variously as "witness" (imperative or subjunctive), "witnesseth", or "to wit". Example: Suffolk, ss. On the Vineyard, the usage is: Dukes County, ss.
"Dukes" is alone among county names in being somewhat descriptive. Franklin is named after a person, and Hampden appears to be made up. All the rest take either the name of a town within the original county boundaries, or else the name of an English county. Perhaps there is some sense that "Dukes", seemingly possessive, needs an actual noun after it.
Among inhabitants of the Vineyard, there seems to be a certain pride in the uniqueness the redundancy confers.
Changing the name of the page to "County of Dukes County" would imply the need for other pages to become "County of Suffolk", "County of Middlesex", and so on. It is probably better to consider that "once is enough" in this single case.
Monomoit 01:06, 17 June 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Poverty?
How could there be poor people in such an expensive place to live, do they have subsidized housing?
