Brunswick, Maine.
Approximate pop: 23,000. In deference to a sensible student who publically denounced my use of the term "townie," I shall experiment with a few other words.
I hope he doesn't mind if I don't use the words he suggested. "Brunswick Resident" is a little too bulky to drop in an article of around 500 words, and "local," uttered in a nation that values the thrill and power of mobility, some might find obliquely feudal and offensive, for instance, as an imputation that a person does not have the means to sever ties with the land.
So, what to do? First, I decided to keep the base "town" and play with various suffixes. There is nothing wrong about a town. Most people agree that, even if cities aren't, towns are sometimes necessary.
But problems arose once I began enumerating endings. "Townsy," for example, would not do. The "s" followed by the long "e" sound is resonant of the "cute," ergo emotional, inconsequential, terminus imposed by phallogocentrics on female names and children's nicknames: Dimsy, Daisy, Mousy...etc. A hegemonic control mechanism, obviously.
The long "o" in "Towno" might be construed as vulgar, placing the name in the same series as "Bozo," "Gonzo," "Dildo" and other disreputable things.
"Towner" is just straight out. "Townist" likens town living to a practice, perhaps even a political position, and leads us to presume how a person feels about a town, or even that he or she is consciously aware of living in one. And as we all know: it's never safe to assume anything about someone else's subjectivity.
In this way, I scrolled through the entire alphabet and many prearranged suffixes and found neither letter grouping nor individual letter which did not open up the term to indictment by someone somewhere.
By this time, I was quite upset. How does one make a sound arrangement of words esteemed not only now but in all times?
In despair, I resorted to the sciences. Science jargon too, of course, is riddled with unforeseen prejudices, but the language as a whole is considered more objective, detached and, best of all, tries to look past the word anyway.
But what did I find? The terms sociologists use to classify towns according to age and patterns of land-use would make your stomach churn. "Infantile," "juvenile," "adolescent," "early mature" and "mature" is only some of the insensitive nomenclature leveled against the space where one lives. I moved to harder sciences and, lo and behold, found similar problems.
The term "town-animal" would come under the double scrutiny of creationists who would vie for the name "town-creature" and rationalists who consider the animal part of us to be subhuman.
"Town-organism" is deceptively clean: hardcore molecular biologists might one day fight to scrub any essence of the "organic" from taxonomies, and the same goes with chaos-theorizing phase-mappers who would understand "life" as another permutation of the "machinic phylum." Who am I to offend them?
So I collapsed, bleary-eyed and consternated, out of the library into the cold night air and walked to my apartment in town.
The vistas I passed, the beautiful people I met, are mine to be seen, savored, but not reproduced.
At least not with the help of that great traducer, the mother tongue. I hope this writer has paid his penance to his readers' satisfaction.
I want them to know that if he uses "town dweller" or "townie" next week, it will be intended only as a sign of nervous exhaustion.