https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland,_Oregon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland,_Maine
it’s roughly 3000 miles from portland to portland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland,_Oregon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland,_Maine
it’s roughly 3000 miles from portland to portland
New England is the worst with this. They just each stole British city names, but as long as they were in different states it worked out. There’s a million Burlingtons in the US alone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burlington
“Stole” is a strong word for the very common behavior of naming things after a favored place or person, or aspirationally with something greater. There’s a lot of recognizable city names in the Americas because a bunch of Europeans came over all at once, but it happened in Australia too (hence names like Victoria and New South Wales) and all over Africa (There’s a Worcester in South Africa, a Sussex in Sierra Leone) but a modern push to decolonize names like that has made them somewhat less common. And there’s a million places named after saints or monarchs.
It’s more a metaphorical usage of that phrase. Every word is stolen from another language.
It’s more that it can get a bit confusing, have had multiple times living there where they thought I was talking about the city in one state and I meant a different one.
“Stole” carries a lot of moral baggage, it implies illicit or underhanded behavior.