Remembrance of Empire in the Nomenclature of Belfast Streets ::

Remembrance of Empire in the Nomenclature of Belfast StreetsIBelfast is Northern Irelands principal city and at clock its centre of government. Its size and past prosperity can be impute to its role as a major seaport in the reason British Empire. In administrative terms at least the city remains British today. A clear result of its history is the fork out demographic pattern of the city and the nomenclature that accompanies it. I intend to question an aspect of this nomenclature the label of Belfast lanes, which are evocative of an olympian past. Such titles should be seen in respect of the political implications and literary consumption of naming.It is safe to assert that a name is a construct and therein has a degree of fictitiousity. To place this in context one could evoke that the naming of an object is less tangible than say its design, naming is governed by few substantial constraints, design by many physical, financial and so on. However, it would be incorrect to suggest naming is pure fiction and past names can be seen as the bridge between the existing object that exists and our ethereal mental image of said object. In write down of this a useful definition of fiction would be to see it as groups of signs often extremely large groups if one considers the average novel. Thus names in their smallest form would be best seen as individual signs. it would then be possible to theorise that up to a certain arcdegree the more signs collected in a single group the broader the fictional and communicative possibilities are.Consider then if the collector of a group of signs in literary terms the author were to bring certain signs together with a thematic intent based upon, for example, an ideological belief. What would be the effect of thoroughfare names that could be collocated in the same semantic field? A fine working example is a part of Belfast referred to as The Holy Land this moniker not being a contemplation of the devout nature of its residents but an acknowledgement of the areas street names, prefixes being Jerusalem, Palestine, Damascus and Cairo. Such groupings of street names are certainly noticed, but do they have the power to charm public attitudes? This is doubtful, for example merely renaming the streets of Britain after famous poets would not assortment its publics apathy towards the art form single-handedly, it would probably all have an effect in support of say an authoritarian stir of enforced poetry appreciation.