Many Europeans seem amused (at best) or downright angry (at worst) by something Anglo-American author Bill Bryson termed the “London, England Phenomenon”. It’s the tendency of the American media to mention a city’s full name in newspaper articles or news broadcasts. “Why”, these Europeans must wonder, “do American broadcasters say ‘London, England’ or ‘Paris, France’ when everyone else in the world seems to know where London and Paris are?”
Well, part of it is because there are thousands of American cities named after more familiar cities. Just in my home state of Georgia, for instance, there’s Rome, Athens, Dublin, Vienna, Geneva, Berlin, Dover, Hull, Bethlehem, Damascus, Oxford, Bristol, Cairo, Kingston, Manchester, Bremen and – just to be complete – Smyrna, hometown of actress Julia Roberts, although that’s cheating, since the city in Turkey has been known as Izmir since 1922 (according to the Greeks) or the mid 1400s (according to the Turks).
There are at least five American cities named Venice, seven called Belfast, nine called Glasgow, sixteen named Paris, twenty each named Athens or Manchester, twenty-one named Berlin, twenty-three named Bristol and twenty-four each named either Florence or Oxford. Many Europeans have heard of Cambridge, Massachusetts because of Harvard University, but not many know about the fifteen other cities of the same name in the US. During the Cold War, it might have seemed like one Moscow was enough… but there are sixteen US towns with the same name. There are even fourteen Birminghams in the US… and two of them are in Ohio and three of them are in Pennsylvania!