Lexical Destiny and the Braying City: How the Five Boroughs Fulfilled Their Name

—NOMEN EST OMEN:

OR

Naming Is Destiny

Commissioned by the Council-of-Concerned-Conservationists

The city’s five boroughs, true to the sound of their own name, have become five burros—braying, burdened, and bewildered beneath the weight of the words they once rode.

El Al-Aghourī, fated by name to live through allegory, lets the language finish its work: nomen est omen—the name was the fate all along.

Filed under: Applied Irony / Civic Zoology / Nominative Determinism — The Course of Empire, Decline (After Cole).