Home
Õismäe (Õismägi) 
Lit. Flower/Blossom hill. After a historic Haabersti estate, and probably nothing to do with flowers at all… First recorded in relation to a Heuschlag Heise Nehm (DEPn, 1646), but this looks odd. The Heise could refer to a Heysze Pattiner, mayor of Tallinn in 1516, or descendent, or other person of that forename. It could then mean ‘hay crop or harvest’ named after Heise or (if Nehm comes from MLG nēmen), taken by Heise. Possible. It could also be due to a ‘typo’ or faulty/dyslexic transcription of two terms designating the same thing: Heuschlag (hay harvest) and ‘Heues Nehm’ (hay-taking) instead of ‘Heise Nehm’ (with i for u and se for es) and not realising that the two are essentially the same, or that the latter clarified the former. Known later as Eismeggi (1697), Essemäggi (1798), Ейснеме (1808, Eisneme), Gesinde Eismäggi (1868, Gesinde means either ‘dependents’, any of a noble’s entourage, from companions to farm-hands and servants, or ‘dependency’, a property run by the same, so probably a kõrvalmõis, see Mõisa). See also Mäe for discussion. TBC.
Õilme (Õile)
Flower, blossom. Street originally called Õie, possibly a Virumaa dialect or other form of this. Interestingly, this is one of those rare words that usually only exist in the plural, perhaps representing the figurative blossom. In the singular, it’s also a dated woman’s name, almost extinct by the fifties, and rare in Tallinn anyway, more of a country name, so the two neighboring streets named after women’s names, Tiiu and Pille, may be due to assuming Õilme was the woman’s name and not the blossom as an irregular singular. The streetname commission likes groups. Anagram of Lõime.
Ogaliku (Ogalik)
Stickleback. Despite the importance of sticklebacks to the development of ethology, the street this name was given to in 1995 was gutted six years later. Then, adding insult to injury, they gave it to another street and, less than 12 weeks later, binned it again! What have they got against sticklebacks? They don’t even have Raudkiisk (cf. Kiisa), the sea stickleback or, is it’s known in Ireland, 15-spined stickleback, only true marine Gasterostid, so lovingly linnaeanized as Spinachia spinachia (raud = iron > spinach, Popeye...). All wrong of course: spinach, originally ‘Spanish vegetable’, actually contains less available iron than cauliflower. The story has it that, way back in the 1870s, a certain German Dr. E von Wolf published a paper giving spinach’s iron content as 10 times higher than it was due to a misplaced decimal point. Maybe, but the certain German Doktor has proved remarkably elusive and the whole thing may well be an urban legend, perhaps cooked up to exculpate the Sailor Man’s creators for their blathering nonsense. Either way, a tricky piece of greenery. As the decidedly odd US lawyer Clarence Darrow once said: “I don’t like spinach, and I’m glad I don’t, because if I liked it I’d eat it, and I just hate it”. The stickleback (or tittlebat as Pickwick would call the three-spined variety) is a noble fish, a close relative to the sea-horse and scaleless as a dolphin, it is a nest-builder and tender wetnurse of relatively cuddly sticklebabies cynically abandoned by an uncaring mother. See Maimu.
