Over the weekend a new piece of civic art appeared in Dibley. As a sculpture, I like it, though alas the local un-culturate have already climbed over it and adorned its facial features with lipstick. It is, I suspect meant to mark the start of the village - except that it's about quarter of a mile too far south, being located on a large grassy triangle where it is indeed a prominent (potentially crash inducing) feature. So what is it, you cry? It seems to be a polar bear, a bear anyway, pinning a man's jacket to a tree stump, and is ostensibly the legend of how 'Dibley' got its name; it is also the biggest example of etymological twaddle I have ever encountered.
There are various versions of the story in circulation, but basically a bear, possibly a dancing bear kept in the cellar of the pub opposite my house, possibly called the first part of the real place name, managed to trap a man in a bearlike-embrace (another alleged possible source of the first part of the name). In order to escape, the man wriggled out of his jacket - and so the name of the village was born. Or not. Not IMHO.
Fact or fiction, and the attractiveness to me or vandals of the statue aside, one does wonder how much was spent on this piece of carved stone and whether there might have been a more purposeful use to which at least some of it might have been put. Afterall, the twaddle legend will always be with us...
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That entry should have thoroughly confused everyone who doesn't realise that you don't actually live in a place called Dibley! As they struggle to relate bears, jackets, struggling and shrugging to the word 'Dibley'! Or is all this supposed to be an illustration of your own struggles to understand 'dasein'?!
Oh Bob, didn't you guess the bear's name was 'Dib' and the jacket 'lay' on the tree stump? Not!! Hopefully no one really thinks I live in Dibley - but in 100 year's time who knows, I may even meld into a legend along with the 'real' vicar of the TV Dibley. Never mind the Emperor Kennedy legend, we could have the Baptist Vicar of Dibley legend...
As for Dasein..... grrr! Though once I had a clue what it meant/did the rest of the chapter made a lot more sense!
As a junior age schoolboy in nearby Atherstone I was confidently taught that Nuneaton got its name from a nun who was gallantly told to eat on when she mistakenly started to consume a noble gentleman's apple. Our teacher was on an Anglo-Canadian exchange and may have genuinely believed this, but even he could have researched in a little more detail to discover that it was in fact a waterside settlement (Etone), rather like its more scholastic namesake on the Thames but with a Benedictine nunnery for neighbours instead of a rather well-known family.
When my education became more mature and sophisticated, the badge of Atherstone Grammar School proudly bore the emblem of - you guessed it - two adders emerging from under a stone. Some sort of a Romulus and Remus thing going on there, but without the child minding. And everyone called the local football team 'the Adders', so that proved it!
Of course these local myths are too ridiculous for words, we all know that. Who for instance would name a whole new settlement after its main extractive mineral? Quarrytown, I ask you!
LOL; indeed. Utterly preposterous, no one would be so practical, they'd have to go for a fancy foreign-sounding name like, hmm, Stonestadt ;o)