A Guy Named Brook

Monday, October 24, 2011

Stoney Brooke

Is it just me or have they gone too far with this?  I was driving through town and saw an advertisement for a neighborhood or some sort of business.  The name of the thing was Stoney Brooke.  First of all, I think stony is misspelled, but then again so is Brook.  I type Stoney Brook into Google and it asks me, "Did you mean: stony brook".  In the search results it showz an apartment complex in Kentucky called Stoney Brooke and also an assisted living community in Ogden also called Stoney Brooke.


I believe a stony brook is a small stream that has stones in it.


When I look up brooke on dictionary.com, the very last definition listed says something like, "a vastly unpopular girl's name before 1965."  The rest are references to poets.  None of the definition refer to a body of water or anything that would contains stones.


When I look up brook, I see several references to a small stream of water.


As if literacy in this country isn't bad enough, let's make a name for something in our town out of two nonexistent words that will confuse people on how to spell.


Do people somehow feel that the e on the end of brook makes it feel like it flows better?  Flowing like a small, smooth stream of water.  To me, the extra e in each word make them more choppy.


Did the company find that Stony Brook was already taken and they couldn't bear to name it something else, so they added the extra e's to make Stoney Brooke?  Much like web sites have done with removing vowels, in order to the domain they want that is already taken.  If they were going to do that, how about name it Stony Brook67?


Were the owners of Stoney Brooke trying to one up the owners of Stony Brook, since misspelled words would be in search engines less, so Stoney Brooke would bubble to the top or at least stand out among the many Stony Brooks.


Please share your opinions on this issue, even if that opinion is, "Get a life, you knuckle head.  Stoney Brooke is just a name."