Late in the day, at the end of work, I skimmed a few of my favorite Craigslist pages online looking for treasure.

About once a week, I’ll visit the Craigslist “game” pages of a few key cities just to see if there are any Avalon Hill games- my favorite board games from the past- for sale there at a decent price.

On this occasion, I happened across a post by a guy in San Diego who said he had a slew of board games for sale, and in the picture he had posted, there were several Avalon Hill game boxes clearly visible, so I sent him an inquiry about possible Avalon Hill titles and their prices.

His response came later this evening, and it was brief: he had had a big collection at one time, but besides an assembly of 17 copies of one game known in gaming circles as a friendship killer because of its dependence on alliances and backstabbing once alliances were made, his collection was gone.

His note was a bit scattered: he didn’t have a list of what games he did have for sale readily available- although his ad said to email him to get such a list. And it sounded like he didn’t know, from the top of his head, what games, if any, he was actually selling.

It was a quick and funny response, but it was also colored in conclusion by a peculiar comment.

I had mentioned I was from New Mexico, and after his terse but cordial reply, he closed his note saying: “NM is a lovely place but when they changed the spelling of Alburquerque I wrote it off as a place that panders to the masses.”

When I read that, I thought- ummm, okay.

Its author- George, we’ll say- George had at one time liked New Mexico, but had his opinion of the state change when its principal city had its name changed.

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It’s true, though. When Albuquerque was founded in 1706, it’s original spelling had that extra “r” in there, after the first “u”.

There are two main stories about how the city got its name.

In the first, and most popular, and most historically-rooted version, the territory’s governor at the time, Don Francisco Cuervo y Valdes, petitioned Spain to establish the settlement as a formal villa to honor Francisco Fernandez de la Cuervo, the eighth Duque De Alburquerque of Spain.

Francisco Fernandez had been the Viceroy of New Spain (governor of the territories of Spain in the New World) shortly before Valdes’ day, from 1653-1660, and the title of dukedom held by Fernandez was tied to the town of Alburquerque in the Spanish province of Badajoz, near Portugal.

Scholars say they have no record of a formal document recognizing the establishment of Francisco’s villa, or any indication that the 35 family settlement requirement was met, but Spanish settlers came to it none the less, and true to the formula for the establishment of a Spanish community, a Spanish presidio was established in the settlement in 1706, and its complimentary mission was completed in Old Town in 1793.

The second version is a little more iffy, if only because the settling of the city predates its incipience. The Galician word for apricot is “albaricoque”, and it goes that Spanish settlers brought apricots to plant in the New World, and in the areas they settled in. Beginning around 1843. The settlers, in this tale, founded the new settlement by an apricot tree.

In both stories the settlement remained and grew and became a town, and later a city in time, but sometime between 1706 and yesterday, the its name did drop an ‘r’ somewhere.

In relation to the popular story, in which Valdes christened the villa to honor the Viceroy, the suggestion is that the popularity of Portuguese general and statesman Alfonso de Albuquerque, whose family originated from the Spanish town of Fernandez’s dukedom, overtook the popularity of Fernandez’s honor, and the villa’s name shed an ‘r’ at some time to match the shortened version bore by the famed general.

Maybe somewhere close to the truth as well is the suggestion for the spelling change related to the “apricot” origin. Word is, as frontiersmen, non-Hispanics, moved into the area, they just had a hard time saying the word Spanish-style, with its hard-rolled r’s.

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With the precise reason for the lost “r” in Albuquerque unresolved, it is true. What was once part of this city’s fine name is gone. Somewhere along the way, an ‘r’ left the community, indelibly changing the identity and nature of New Mexico’s little biggest city.

But the lost letter doesn’t change my perplexity about George’s comments.

To hear he liked New Mexico, but was then turned off to it because Alburquerque was re-spelled made me scratch my head, because that name change had to have happened… nearly two centuries ago.

And certainly, if any place deserves to be known as “a place that panders to the masses”, it has to be one that had the spelling of its name altered by a letter because an influx of European non-Spanish speakers had a hard time saying a rolling r.

That’s a T-shirt right there: “The City Formally Known As Alburquerque”.

Oh New Mexico. You ‘R’ discarder. You pandered you.