I grew up in a small town named “Ridgecrest.”
It got that name because, in 1943, people finally got tired of calling it Crumville. It may have been an improvement, but Ridgecrest never seemed to have much soul, or any real connection to the community or region.
I remember a movement to change the name to Maturango. It seemed to make sense, Maturango is the name of a small but popular museum, and it seemed more unique to the area.
What I heard was the movement fizzled after someone looked up the word–and discovered it means “horse dung.”
The reason I’m talking about it on this blog is that I always “sort of” believed the story. By which I mean that I wanted to believe it, feared it might not be true, so I never looked up the actual meaning. Now, with Wikipedia staring back at me from almost every device I own, not looking something up is much more difficult. This puts a lot of pressure on my little universe of great stories that may or may not be true.
I ran across this description on Wikipedia, describing the origin of the name of Maturango Peak:
It may be derived from the Spanish word “maturrango” (an appellation used in Buenos Aires for a European, meaning a bad horseman or a bad horse), or it may be derived from the name Malarango, a chief of the Coso people
Technically, my originally story could still hold some truth. With all the dialects of Spanish floating around, a word that starts off as “bad horseman” could easily mean “horse dung” somewhere. But who cares? This is even better! Apparently:
In Buenos Aires there’s a word that means European–but really means “bad horseman” or “bad horse!”