| Mysterious maybe mythologically motivated Monogahela metropolitan motto |
[Oct. 2nd, 2012|02:39 pm]
Scott
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One of the (few!) fun parts of applying for medical jobs is getting to see the weird little cities I could be living in next year.
Case in point: Morgantown, West Virginia. Home of 30,293 people and the West Virginia University medical system, which is looking for trainee psychiatrists. Also home to the country's only practical people-mover mass transit system. Not exactly New York City, but if they end up wanting me there are certainly worse places to have to spend the next four years.
But that's not what interests me. Wikipedia's pages on cities often list their town motto, which is always some boring collection of applause light words translated into Latin, like "Freedom, liberty, and also sovereignty"
Except the motto of Morgantown is "Vestigia nulla retrorsum regina monongahelae", or "The Queen of the Monongahela has nothing to return to." A few pages mention it, but none of them explain it or even acknowledge that it needs explanation.
Some quick research reveals a few leads. The Monongahela is a river that runs through the city. There's a city beauty pageant called "Queen of the Monongahela", although it seems just as likely that the pageant was named after some sort of historical or mythical figure as that the motto references a beauty queen.
But overall I'm stumped. It's not just the mysterious "Queen of the Monongahela". If the motto were "The Queen of the Monongahela smiles upon our beautiful city", that would fall into the category of "vague but complimentary" that marks a lot of town mottoes. But "has nothing to return to" sounds self-deprecatory, as if the city has become a sort of wasteland and if she ever came back (where is she, anyway?) she would find that everything she loved about it was gone.
In other words, it is a mystery that has been bothering me, and it is so far totally unprecedented in that the Internet has no answer.
Is anyone reading this blog from West Virginia or somewhere near West Virginia and possessing of an answer to this puzzle?
EDIT: mme_n_b is able to solve the problem both classily and classically. |
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