Imagining What You Know (And Don't Know)

An analogy for the difficulty of imagining great cities

Usually, you have trouble imagining something you’re not familiar with. But it’s interesting how sometimes you have trouble imagining something you are familiar with.

For example, I couldn’t come up with these names:

This is a screenshot from an old Super Nintendo baseball game, where the Japanese developers came up with fake American/English names for the imaginary players (the game didn’t have an MLB license). Here are more of the names from the different fake teams, compiled by someone on Reddit:

It reminds me of this famous Italian song which is gibberish English, meant to parody American pop music and imitate what it supposedly sounded like to Italians:

It’s really, really uncanny to read those faux-English names written by Japanese game developers: Pomlin, Newksbury, Pollins, Fearson, Lichardson. Some of them are striking because they look and feel like real names but not quite.