The Skagerrak, which is a body of water between Norway, Sweden, and Denmark, contains among other things mackerel, herring, and cod. It is also a pleasant word to say aloud — three syllables, the second stressed, the double-k at the end like the sound of a small boat touching a dock. One thinks of it this week because Belfast, by contrast, is two syllables, both of them flat, and has been appearing in headlines next to words like "riot" and "fire" and "water cannon" [15, 18] with a frequency that makes the name itself start to sound like breaking glass.
Place names do this. They collect associations the way a ship's hull collects barnacles. For a few days, "Belfast" has meant burning vehicles and masked men and a Sudanese asylum seeker charged with attempted murder [15, 20]. Before that it meant other things. The city has had several tenures as a word. What is striking this week is how many other place names have been recruited to stand next to it in the same sentences: Glasgow, Edinburgh, Ayr [27], Southampton [30], even the Sandyknowes roundabout [25], which is not so much a place as a piece of infrastructure that has had petrol bombs thrown at it and has therefore earned a mention in the BBC live blog.