How does this thing work? Well, it uses the same technique that a human would use to arrive at a name for a suburban subdivision: it concatenates two or three bucolic-sounding words together regardless of how nonsensical they are, and regardless of whether the words are apropos of the actual physical setting. These places grow like weeds in the Denver area, and I'm sure where you live, too. For the past couple of years, I've gotten more and more amused by these utterly meaningless and cartoonish monikers, and admittedly fascinated with the fungibility and combinatorial potential they seem to have. I'm also pretty intrigued at the fact that they often are so nonsensical as to be absurd, especially when taken out of context. For example, what the hell is a FoxGate? A gate to keep foxes out? A colonial township chartered by foxes? Meaningless names for meaningless places seems to be the order of the day.

Also fascinating is the near-ubiquitous use of that NewEconomy^® spelling, where the two capitalized words are crammed together, as if you were buying software, like MyHousingDevelopment 2.0. You get the idea.

So anyway, eventually I started mentally collecting these specimens as I saw them with the hopes of creating a script that could generate them, figuring that it would be a good exercise of programming skills, and good for a few yuks, if nothing else.

By the way, my all-time favorite real-life subdivision name... actually there are two: the first is SkyRidge at RidgeGate. There's that NewEconomy spelling we like so much. The second is The Hermitage. Hermitage is actually a type of wine, which is a dumb enough name for a subdivision, but its synonym, a dwelling for hermits, yields the greatest irony. More recently I've started to notice that the peddlers of such dream homes have run out of combinations using idyllic, pastoral words, and so some of the newer subdivisions have even stupider names, cheap sentimental shit like "Inspiration" or "Homecoming." How anyone could bring themselves to move into such a place is a source of great wonder to me.

Technically speaking, the generator is nothing more than a PHP script and a MySQL database containing meaningless words in tabular form. The script selects a record at random from each of three columns and concatenates it with one or two more other randomly selected words. The script has some limitations, but to me, the fact that you'll sometimes get an improbable result like RidgeGate Ridge makes it that much funnier and serves to demonstrate just how ridiculous some of these names are. The McMansion images came from some homebuilder website, and are randomly selected also.

And by all means, if you've got some subdivision words to add, send them along to yalestar at yahoo dot and com.

Incidentally, I learned about midway through this project that I'm not the only one with this idea. Here's another.