I still refer to Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport as Billy Mitchell Field, decades after they changed the name.
They’re not mutually exclusive. It’s still Arrowhead Stadium, if you prefer. Sold naming rights don’t really interfere in this case, since the legacy name is preserved in the full official title “GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium”.
I’m going out on a limb and saying this name still isn’t as good as “Arrowhead Stadium”.
True. But for anyone not beholden to the NFL money machine, shortening it back down to the traditional stadium name remains technically correct.
Certainly, no one is expecting to tailgate on GEHA field. The grounds crew would take exception to parking on the fields or setting up barbecue grills at the 50-yard line.
Yep. I always call it Billy Mitchell.
Only Wisconsin would name an airport after a guy who got court-martialed.
You surely mean pubic outcry?
I think that Serendip was much better than Ceylon or Sri Lanka. It had something serendipitous.
West Berlin was way cooler than Berlin. Believe me. It was not just because I was younger.
He got court-martialed for being right about air power.
I like Bombay better than Mumbai; Madras better than Chennai; Calcutta better than Kolkata; Bangalore better than Bengaluru. Not that the new names are that bad, but I just like the old ones better. There’s significant history attached to the old names.
Well, sort of. Nobody is quite sure where the name Bombay came from and in all likelihood it’s just a corruption. It only goes back 400-500 years. And most of modern Mumbai didn’t exist 400 years ago - a shocking amount of the modern city is built on reclaimed land.
The city of Cape Canaveral never changed its name. The U.S. Board of Geographic names did change the name of the geographic feature known as the Cape to Cape Kennedy, but within a few years it agreed to recognize the Florida legislature’s decision to keep the name as Canaveral on all state publications and maps. The NASA Launch Operations Center was renamed Kennedy Space Center and has kept the name.
There’s a very old piece by Cecil on this. Why did they change the name of Cape Kennedy back to Cape Canaveral? - The Straight Dope
Squaw Valley. What the fuck are you going to refer to the Olympics that went down there? The Pinnacles?
Fuck that shit.
There’s even more significant history attached to the “new” names, because they’ve been used much longer by the communities that actually live there.
“Calcutta” was just a colonial-era English-speakers’ attempt to represent the local toponym “Kolikata” and its dialect variants. Likewise, “Bangalore” is an Anglophone attempt to represent Kannada “Bengaluru”.
“Bombay” is similarly a 16th-century Portuguese spelling of one of the many dialect variants of the local toponym “Mumbai”.
“Madrasapattinam” and “Chennapattnam” were originally (at least since the 17th century) two adjacent villages in the area that grew into the colonial city of Madras, and both were used to refer to the whole emergent urban area. The British chose the former toponym to officially designate their city, but locals continued to use the latter.
“Indigenous name” and “colonial name” are IMHO more accurate descriptors than “new name” and “old name” in these cases. There’s nothing new about the current officially designated toponyms, and in fact the colonial versions that we think of as the “old names” were simply derived from forms of those indigenous names.
I dunno if this is a whoosh, because it’s so silly? Of course the name “Iran” is more logical to use for a region whose own inhabitants have been calling it “ērān” literally for millennia. The name “Persia” is also (derived from) an ancient Iranian ethnonym/toponym (Parsa/Pars) applying to part of that region and people. It was mistakenly (or just loosely) applied to all Iran/Iranians by other ancient peoples, particularly the Greeks.
Naturally there’s nothing wrong with liking the more familiar European forms of such names, like “Calcutta” or “Persia”. But when we try to suggest an objective justification for that preference on the grounds that the European versions have more “significant history” or “logic” than the traditional forms used by the people who actually lived there, ISTM that that’s getting into distorting historical reality.
The Kennedy Family said it would be wonderful if Cape Canaveral was Cape Kennedy. They meant the base, not the whole cape.
Bangkok is better than Krung Thep Maha Nakhon, but the Thai are seemingly okay with Bangkok.
I concur.
Idlewild Airport sounds much cooler than JFK.
There was no city there before the British moved in and created one. My understanding is that the name is a partial translation of the Portuguese phrase meaning “good bay”. But the Portuguese didn’t have a city there, nor did the locals. There were a few fishing villages in the area, one of which may have been named Mumbai.
I mean TECHNICALLY so but his idea of superior air power was basically using heavy bombers to sink battleships which as far as I remember literally never happened and was a tremendous waste of resources. Smaller dive bombers and torpedo planes win the day but that wasn’t the Army’s original plan for sinking ships they thought B-17s could easily do it.
I still call it Sears Tower, who the duck is Willis?!
The 1960 Winter Olympics?
Which is why the Portuguese in the 16th and 17th centuries came up with their various attempts at the spelling of that name (“Mombayn”, “Bombain”, “Bambaye”, etc.) to refer to that locality. The folk-etymology explanation that “Bombay” is derived from a Portuguese phrase for “good bay” is unsupported by evidence.
It’s true, but irrelevant, that the urban development of colonial Bombay was done by the British. The reason they gave their city that particular name in the first place was because that was what local people called that area. It’s emphatically not an “older” name than the currently official form “Mumbai”.
Mount McKinley just sounds… majestic and big. Then they had to rename Denali, which sounds like a pasta dish.
Speaking purely as an Anglophone, “Dublin” is a whole lot easier than “Baile Atha Cliath”.