I’m too lazy to write anything tonight, so it’s Hitchens to the rescue. No, not that Hitchens, but his brother Peter, who writes for the UK Sunday Mail.
The item at hand deals with a pet peeve of my own: the pretentious and unnecessary revision of familiar place-names. In my day Ceylon has become Sri Lanka, Peking Beijing, Cambodia Kampuchea, Bombay Mumbai, Burma Myanmar, and so forth. It is a great bloody nuisance, and I am not the only one who thinks so, as we learn here.
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Interestingly, I just read the same complaint as I was riding the bus to Kyung Hee University a half hour ago — except not by Hitchens but from the fingertips of Geoffrey Wheatcroft, writing an article for the Washington Post but appearing in my copy of The Korea Herald under the title “The globe, politically corrected.”
Jeffery Hodges
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