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To date, I have not received any memoranda from the management of this newspaper advising me that I can no longer refer to Xxxxxxx Field at Mile High (noun missing that is supposed to follow a compound adjective), but must instead call it new Mile High stadium.
So until the official word arrives here, this seems a worthy topic of discussion. On one side is this argument:
Perhaps the stadium district board should not have sold the naming rights to Invesco, but the board had the legal right to do so, and it did. So we are all obliged to call the stadium whatever the stadium board wants us to call it, since the stadium board was acting on behalf of the public.
The other argument is about as simple. As Americans, we enjoy the right of free speech, which means we can call things whatever we want to call them, despite the desires of the People of Money.
So you and I and the editors of the Post are free to use whatever term we want for that facility: Taxpayer Stadium, Corporate Welfare Arena, Subsidy Field, Place Where Pat Bowlen Proudly Wears the Pelts of Deceased Mammals, or new Mile High stadium. Just as long as we both know what we're talking about, it doesn't matter what term we use.
There are problems with that approach, though. An old
college friend who now lives in Seattle and I exchange
considerable email, wherein we refer to the Wall Street
Journal as The Daily Capitalist,
by analogy with
The Daily Worker
once published by the Communist
Party of the United States.
Similarly, I referred to the Independence Institute as the Asphalt & Gravel Institute, since that Golden-based think tank has never seen a highway or a shopping mall that it couldn't support wholeheartedly as a benefit to society. This once caused some confusion in our correspondence; he had an in-law who worked for the real Asphalt Institute in Littleton, an organization whose existence I had been blissfully unaware of.
That's in private correspondence, though. When preparing material for public consumption, it's generally not up to me.
For instance, I think Pikes Peak
is barbaric.
There was no one involved named Pikes.
It is named
for Zebulon Montgomery Pike. But the U.S. Board on
Geographic Place Names abhors apostrophes (one of its rare
exceptions is Martha's Vineyard in Massachusetts, and
that's probably because so many wealthy and powerful people
summer there that they can keep their apostrophe when the
rest of us can't), and the Post follows the usual newspaper
rule of deferring to the Board.
But the Board's authority extends only to the names used
by the federal government on its maps and the like. It
can't issue a warrant for my arrest if I use Pike's
Peak
-- which I do, when the decision is in my hands,
as with the little magazine we publish here.
As many naming controversies illustrate, nomenclature is often about power. I don't believe the Board has the power to change the rules of English orthography by removing apostrophes from possessives, any more than I believe that Invesco has the power to change the rules of English grammar by using a compound adjective as the subject of a preposition. They will gain that power only if we allow them to, and I would rather exercise that power myself.
The biblical book of Genesis recounts that Adam was
given dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the
fowl of the air, and over every living thing,
and
further, whatsoever Adam called every living creature,
that was the name thereof.
That's an ancient tradition that associates naming with
power. It shows up in modern times, too. Consider this
from The Kennedy Imprisonment: A Meditation on Power
by Garry Wills.
President John F. Kennedy's old Navy friend Paul
Red
Fay was regularly addressed as 'Grand Old
Lovable' by Kennedy, who understood instinctively how one
asserts ownership over another by renaming him.... To serve
its purpose, the name had to be made up by Kennedy himself.
Thus men normally called 'Jim' by their family became
'Jamie' to John Kennedy. 'Ben' Bradlee became
'Benjy.'
Malcolm X saw that when he changed his name from Malcolm
Little -- to him, Little
was some white
slaveholder's name that had been passed down, a continuing
reminder of subjugation. Similar factors were apparently
involved when Cassius Marcellus Clay changed his name to
Muhammad Ali nearly 40 years ago, although it should be
noted that his original namesake, a prominent Kentucky
politician in the 1830s and 40s, was a strident
abolitionist who suffered violent attacks for his
opposition to slavery.
Shakespeare wrote that a rose by any other name would
smell as sweet,
and that's true. But whether we call
it a rose
or a snarguswort
if often a
reflection of who's in charge, and over time, as the
stadium naming controversy continues, we'll eventually
learn how much power can be purchased for $80 million.
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