There's No 'Washington, D.C.' -- but I'm Not Renaming My Column

What is the name of our city? It is often referred to as Washington, D.C., i.e. Washington, the District of Columbia. Your column is named "John Kelly's Washington." Yet in your Sept. 10 column you referred to Eleanor Holmes Norton as "the District's nonvoting member of Congress." Which is it? Is Washington, like New York, a city so nice they named it twice? I live in Silver Spring, which is only named once but is often pluralized as Silver Springs by people more familiar with the Florida tourist attraction.

-- Michael Hoyt, Silver Spring

What's in a name? Wouldn't a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

That's what William Shakespeare wanted to know. Of course, the Bard couldn't spell his own name the same way twice, so perhaps he's not the best person to consult.

Instead, let's go back to a time before there was a Washington, D.C., a time when there was barely a United States of America. Our fledgling country's Constitution called for the seat of government to be located in a district not exceeding 10 miles square. George Washington got the honor of picking where that 10-mile square would be.

He chose a location on the Potomac River that incorporated two existing cities: Georgetown in Maryland and Alexandria in Virginia.

On Sept. 9, 1791, the commissioners appointed to oversee the construction of the capital wrote to Pierre L'Enfant, the man charged with designing it: "We have agreed that the federal District shall be called 'The Territory of Columbia,' and the federal City 'The City of Washington.' "

L'Enfant was to title the map he was preparing "A Map of the City of Washington in the Territory of Columbia."

Why "Columbia"? It came, of course, from Christopher Columbus, the fellow who "discovered" America. Columbia was something poets used to symbolize and mythologize the new American republic, personified in the form of a beautiful woman in flowing white gowns.

The term reached its zenith in an epic poem by Joel Barlow, a poet and politician who owned Kalorama. Barlow's "The Columbiad" is considered pretty much unreadable today.