Lyco is a giant geek.

Law school is about to start and so the procrastination begins. In my last post, I was perturbed by the notion that someone would intentionally name a town Shrewsbury. So I looked it up. Yes, I am a geek.

So, like many (read: all) towns in New England, it was named after a town in (gasp) England. Its name came from Anglo-Saxon Scrobbesburh = "fort in the scrub-land region" or "Scrobb's fort". This was from its Welsh name Amwythig, which means "fortified place".

Scrobbesburh is apparently pronounced Shrubs-borough and when the Normans came in, they “corrupted” it into Sloppes-burie. This eventually became Shropshire (the county in which Shrewsbury resides) and its also where the alternative name for the town came from (Salop). So the two intermingled and we ended up with Shrewsbury. Wow.

Aren’t we all just a little more enlightened today?