Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Zippy is in love with words — beautiful words, somewhat ridiculous words, peculiar words, they’re all delicious to Zippy (a manifestation of word attraction). Names especially so. Here he is savoring two geographical names from Montana: Grundy Gulch and Zortman:

As is customary with Bill Griffith, the names are genuine. He does seem to have taken some liberties with the depiction of Grundy Gulch, though. There seems to be no actual town named Grundy Gulch — nothing like what we see in the cartoon. There is only

A gulch [in Lewis & Clark County] named for David Grundy, discoverer of the gulch. (link)

(My Times Atlas of the World lists a Grundy VA and a Grundy Center IA, but no Grundy Gulch.)

However, there is a town of Zortman MT, with an entertaining website (with photo), almost all of it promissory.

Zortman, Montana is a historic gold town located in the middle of the Little Rocky Mountains.  It has been home to farmers, ranchers, sheepmen, miners, storekeepers, loggers, teamsters and outlaws, among others.

…

There is camping, hiking, float trips, self guided nature tours, gold panning, pow-wows, fishing and hunting.

For those who just like to kick back and let the world go by for awhile, the Zortman area provides the perfect spot.  For those who don’t want to be quite so out of touch, the information highway runs right through Zortman. There are several small businesses in the area already taking advantage of the future. [There’s an optimistic page on the “Technology Gold Rush in Zortman”.]

The Accommodations page lists no actual places to stay, but has a photo of a big-city-scape (viewed from on high), with the promise:

Here we will put a picture of the inside of a room or the view from one of our rooms.

The Rates/Amenities page tells us:

Here we may list our rates for the different rooms we have. These rates could vary, so it is always a good idea to confirm the rates when making reservations. [No address is provided for such confirmations.]

All in all, the site has a lot of goofy Zippylicious charm.

This entry was posted on February 20, 2010 at 11:31 am and is filed under Attitudes, Linguistics in the comics, Names, Words. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.