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Sääse (Sääsk) 
Gnat, midge or mosquito. After the marshy hayfield it was built upon. First known in Russian as Комаровская (Komarovskaya, mosquito, 1901), another explanation springs to mind, that of the elitist Soviet resort on the Karelian Isthmus north of St Petersburg, Komarovo – where Fabergé and Leonid Andreyev, author of The Seven Who Were Hanged, The Red Laugh, etc., used to live – but not at all, Комаро́во was renamed from Finnish Kellomäki (bell hill) in 1948 after V. L. Komarov, President of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1936-45. The present name was acquired in 1923 along with its German counterpart Mückenstraße. A pedant or a hair-splitter (and why do I know this one?) is a sääsekurnaja, literally a gnat-strainer or gnat-distresser... And ‘to make a mountain out of a molehill’ is sääsest elevanti tegema, or ‘make an elephant out of a mosquito’. Part of an insect street-name group. See also Vaablase.
Saeveski (Saeveski)
Sawmill. Formerly a continuation of Rulli (1958-1963) previously known as Rulli jatk (annex/extension, 1949-1958), a variant of jätk, the sole occurrence of this term in Estonian odonymy.
Salme (Salm)
Seemingly derived from a maritime term for a deep, narrow strait or sound between two islands (see also Väina). There is a Suur salm (great strait) in greater Tallinn between the islands of Aegna and Kräsuli (from Swedish Gräsö, grass island). And in Saaremaa, where Silm tends to occur more frequently than Salm, there is a Vahase silm, aka Vahase salm, aka Vahasuu (vaha = wax, suue:suudme = estuary, embouchure, muzzle of a gun, etc.) between Abruka and Vahase islands south of Kuressaare. Street formerly known as Militärstraße (1913) or Военная ул. (1907), both meaning military, then Sõja, war, till 1951. But also parallel to Linda and hence another Kalevipoeg character. Salme was a hen who incubated the grouse’s egg from which her ‘sister’ Linda hatched, then married the Youth of the Stars and disappeared from the story (related to Latvian goddess Saule, sun goddess and spinner of sunbeams?). However, hundreds of other Salme stories existed pre Kreutzwald. Saaremaa’s Salme is also location of what is so far the earliest evidence of vikings, two ships, built maybe 650-700, used for burial and dated to around 700-750. The kick-off for the viking age has generally been accepted as the attack on Lindisfarne in Northumbria, UK, in 793, but evidence from the ship burial puts this 50+ years earlier.







