Quote:
Originally Posted by issybird
Yeah, that's how I felt about Mother of Rivers. I also, frankly, don't get the Rip Van Winkle association. Ol' Rip was from the Catskills.
That's what I liked about the nicknames. So many seemed so, inappropriate?
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I HAD to look this up. From the NC History Project:
"During the early 1800s, North Carolina acquired a nickname: “the Rip Van Winkle State.” It was named so because more than few considered the state’s economy to be asleep while neighboring states were bustling with production and trade. In modern politics, the term is used when policy makers oppose or promote certain plans: they want to improve the state’s economy, not take it backward, the argument goes, into its former Rip Van Winkle state."
and
"There have been conflicting interpretations regarding this nickname. Historian William Powell claims that not much “was going on anywhere” in North Carolina during the early to mid-1800s and that people were satisfied with their backward state of affairs. He also writes that it never occurred to them that the “government might take steps to improve their lot in life.”"
Ahhhh, North Carolina, government asleep at the wheel.
