Last week, on November 18th, in Florey’s Bookstore in Pacifica, a reader wanted to know exactly where the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior is.

Many years ago, real estate agents named the area wherein the Bedlam Blue Bungalow resides by its borders: the avenues named for a railroad executive (Crocker) and the race that Wonder Woman came from (Amazon). My husband Brian and my sons Zane and Aidan, may be warriors, but they are not Amazons.

Neighborhood names are funny things. Some make sense. Bayview has a view of the Baybay and The the Outer Sunset is where the sun sets. Nob Hill was named after the Nabobs who ran the railroads. The Tenderloin was so named because the cops who worked that beat were bribable, and so they could afford to buy the better cuts of meat.

But just as often the names are arbitrary. We used to live on Fair Oaks, down the block from Armistead Maupin. We called it the boundary between the Mission and the Castro, but people who wanted to sell houses in that neighborhood called it Liberty Hill. San Francisco also has a Little Hollywood and a Lone Mountain, but I’ve never heard anyone refer to either.

Has anyone else wondered why Cow Hollow is so far away from the Cow Palace?

And what about our streets too?. Who does the naming? There are some 2,300 roads in the city I call Frank. James Van Ness was the mayor of San Francisco from in 1855 to 1856-56. He stepped down during the time that San Francisco stopped having a mayor, but clearly was in long enough to get one of the city’s longest thoroughfares named after him. But why designate South Van Ness? Shouldn’t that make the other side North Van Ness?

Why does Market stop being Market when it gets to the Castro and becomes Portola, all at once? Maybe Gaspar de Portola had a little something on the dlDL?

Why is Circular Avenue a diagonal line?

Even numbered streets are arbitrary. We have a 12th Avenue and a 14th Avenue, but don’t havenot that unlucky number in between, so we named that street after Brigadier General Frederick Funston, who commanded Army efforts following the great quake of 1906. A guy named Victor Duboce was elected to the Board of Supervisors in 1909 but served less than a year before dying. Maybe he really did have bad luck, because his name graces what would have been 13th Street.

Gough was named after a milkman. Don’t hate. In 1855, he was on the committee designated to name roads. He had a sister named Octavia, which probably explains why the two streets run parallel, but never intersect.

Howard was named after William Davis Merry Howard, who ran a vigilante gang. And even though San Francisco hosts a Maiden Lane, Bertha Lane, Lucy, Jessie, Minna and Cora sStreets were not all named after virgins but rather ladies of the night.

For the record, Lois Lane was a reporter and not a prostitute.

She wasn’t the only newspaper writer to get a byway Frank: Mark Twain Street and Herb Caen Way. And while it might be nice, The Boulevard of the Fisher-Paulsons is too long for a street sign.

In the Inner Excelsior, motorways are named after foreign nations and foreign cities: France, Italy, Prague, Geneva. The street originally named China got re-named Excelsior but we know there aren’t any pandas there. Japan and India Avenue avenues were re-named as well. It got me wondering whether Russia, the street between Persia and France,used to be called Ukraine but then got annexed.

Re-naming streets can be expensive. When the Board of Supervisors re-named Army as Cesar Chavez in 1995, it cost more than a million dollars to re-make all the signs.

Another head-scratcher: Why do we have the North Bay, the South Bay, the East Bay but not the West Bay?

A lot of people in the Bay Area refer to the 49 square miles at the tip of the peninsula as “the city.” Relative term. I’ve lived in Ozone Park, Brooklyn, Hoboken and Jersey City, and all of those places refer to Manhattan as the “the city.” Since Jersey City is by its own name and definition a city, one wonders why they gave Manhattan, which is only one-fifth of a city, the title.

So yes, we live in the Outer, Outer, Outer, Outer Excelsior, Latin for Ever, Ever, Ever, Ever Upward. You will not find it on a map. The neighborhood is more of an attitude than a geographic location.

What’s in a name? Our neighborhood, by any other name, would smell as sweet.