When on a hot summer's day you buy a carbonated beverage to quench your thirst, how do you order it? Do you ask for a soda, a pop or something else? That question lay at the basis of an article in the Journal of English Linguistics...

The bottom map dates from 1860 (i.e. the eve of the Civil War), and indicates where cotton was produced at that time, each dot representing 2,000 bales of the stuff. Cotton was King back then, and mainly so in the densely cultivated border area between...

As discussed before on this blog, electoral maps have a strange tendency to transmit more than the results of a political horse-race. They often serve as quirky memorials of ancient cultural borders, as suggested in the following cases: France’s 2007...

  A few miles northwest of the small town of Minden, in the seemingly endless Nebraska plains, lies a field shaped like the state itself. By intelligent design or as an accident of agriculture?  Either option seems unlikely in a landscape so...

Leo Belgicus by Petrus Kaerius (1617), copied from the original design by Michael Aitzinger. Image taken here from the website of the Sanderus map shop in Ghent.   Lions are not native to the Low Countries, but here is one particular specimen that...

1. Asphalt Maine Looking down upon the patched-up surface of an unnamed street, J. David Lovejoy couldn’t help noticing a remarkable example of accidental geography. The patch bears a striking resemblance to Maine, imitating its slanted,...

  Designed by J.R.R. Tolkien’s son Christopher and included in most editions of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, the map of Middle-Earth is one of the best-known examples of fantasy cartography. The iconic map shows the fictional continent in which the...