Aniseed Balls

What is Self Storage? Self! Reflexive! I wash myself; I feed myself; I talk to myself; I play with myself. But it's not that simple. Some uses require a more intimate cultural perspective. A self-adhesive pad is not one that sticks to itself (though ironically that annoyance happens quite often), but one that sticks by itself without you having to apply adhesive. What about the recently introduced self-adhesive stamps? They already had glue on them. This time they stick by themselves without you having to lick them. Stretchy stuff this self business. The BBC used to irritate me with its persistent use of "self-declared demilitarized zone". Presumably the justification is that the warring factions agreed amongst themselves to limit the hostilities, rather than being imposed upon. The coup de grâce is "the self-declared war on terrorism". What the self is for in this construction is beyond me. But I posit the following. In his Complete Plain Words, Sir Ernest Go

The capital of Madagascar is Antananarivo. This is pronounced 'Tananarive' because in Malagasy you don't bother with the first or last syllables of place names. The French changed the spelling to Tananarive, but the old place name spellings were restored in the 1960s following independence. Of course many assumed that they had restored an old name rather than an old spelling, so you invariably hear Europeans pronounce the capital with six syllables instead of four.