Location Taken: Seattle, Washington
Time Taken: June 2008
This is my first post I’ve written since I moved out to the Seattle area. It’s also the two-year anniversary of this blog. Lovely coincidence, don’t you think?
I’ve noticed I solidly think of it as moving to the “Seattle area” rather than moving to “Washington”. Probably because my brain definitively associates the name Washington with Washington DC.
There’s a lovely coincidence between those two names that goes deeper than you’d think. Washington was actually the second choice name for the state. The area had long been called after the major river that forms the southern border of the current state, but the name was already in use in the country and they feared confusion.
The river? The Columbia. The place using the name? The District of Columbia.
It was only a decade or two after Washington became a state before the Federal Capital (The District of Columbia) and the city around it (Washington) grew close enough that people started just calling the area Washington DC. I hope there were a few of the people who named the state around to properly appreciate the irony.
