bel blared: There are scads of examples like this and it only ridicules their motives, which are basically not bad. There is even a hotline set up by the government to give the ‘accepted’ names for everything. Argh – it drives me plain crazy!!!!!
Bel, I sympathise, I really do. In the interests of political and cultural correctness, there was an effort in New Zealand a few years ago to change the place names given by us colonial types back to the original names used by the Maori (who, I'm sure, my colleague Max will refer to as tangata whenua).
I don't know so much about other areas, but I come from Otago (Otakou in Maori). Otakou is also the name of a town on the Otago Peninsula. LINZ (or whoever) came up with lists of Maori-equivalent names and printed them on maps and published them and used all sorts of approaches to gain acceptance.
However, even the local tribe, the Ngai Tahu, most of whom are as white as I am through 1.5 centuries of intermarriage, failed to use them. So there we are, two names for lots of places, but only the existing one being used ...
Things move on. Turning the clock back never really works.
