After reading the three sources we were provided, I believe that it's clear that Eliot didn't invent his title and actually lifted it straight out of the Grail tradition, where "the waste land" is essentially a fixed term for a specific kind of ruin. Malory uses those exact words: after a king is struck down, the land stops producing anything, and the text says plainly, "men call it... the waste land." So before a reader even opens Eliot's poem, the title is doing a citation's job. It is alluding that this modern work belongs to that older lineage of stories about a land gone barren because something at its center is broken. What I found interesting about this is that the phrase itself is build from two words doing specific work. In this case, "Waste" doesn't mean empty from the start, but rather it means used up, drained, and no longer able to produce what it once did. The use of the word "Land" means shared, common ground, and not one person's private situation. So the title is asserting something communal has been exhausted, not that one character is sad. In my opinion, thats a larger claim than a title like "London" or "1922" could ever make and I think that the sources back this up. Weston explains why a barren landscape gets tied to a person's condition in the first place—she says the tradition rests on a king's sickness being "sympathetically reflected on the land," meaning one figure's failure spreads outward and blights everything around him. Hence, Eliot's title borrows that logic and drops the individual king out of it, generalizing the wound to a whole era.