Google Maps just fucking SUCKS now

[kphoger]

Mount McKinley was named by a McKinley supporting gold prospector at a time when Alaskans had no say on the matter. It's a completely arbitrary name, unlike Denali which has a history going back many centuries.

I don't think anybody is denying that.

Mount Rainier is named after a friend of the British Royal Navy captain who sailed by and noticed it one day.  That doesn't mean I'm going to start calling it Tahoma instead.

[Max Rockatansky]

Mount McKinley was named by a McKinley supporting gold prospector at a time when Alaskans had no say on the matter. It's a completely arbitrary name, unlike Denali which has a history going back many centuries.

I don't think anybody is denying that.

Mount Rainier is named after a friend of the British Royal Navy captain who sailed by and noticed it one day.  That doesn't mean I'm going to start calling it Tahoma instead.

It could be formally be renamed Tacoma so most people would shorthand it to "Taco" like they do with the Toyota truck.

[DTComposer]

I went down a little rabbit hole about naming conventions for bodies of water. Turns out the International Hydrographic Organization has 100 member states (most of the countries with a coastline, including the U.S.) and that they issued an official, "in-force" document on names:

https://iho.int/uploads/user/pubs/standards/s-23/S-23_Ed3_1953_EN.pdf

It's from 1953, and subsequent drafts exist but haven't been adopted due to local naming disputes (Korea and Japan, for example).

[bandit957]

There's also this business about the Southern Ocean.

That was wholly the CIA's creation.

[Scott5114]

Off topic, but...

The big mountain near me was called Nuvagantu by the Southern Paiute, which means "where the snow sits". And indeed it's about the only place in Southern Nevada you can find snow if you want it. The first white guy to climb it was from Charleston, South Carolina, so he called it Mount Charleston.

I think it makes a lot more sense to name it something that has to do with the mountain itself than some city a few thousand miles away which, other than this one guy, doesn't have much cultural overlap with the area.

But if I were to start calling it Nuvagantu (which is a much cooler sounding name) nobody would know what I was talking about. (And if I started calling NV 159 Nuvagantu Boulevard even fewer people would know what I'm on about.)

[Scott5114]

Mount Rainier is named after a friend of the British Royal Navy captain who sailed by and noticed it one day.  That doesn't mean I'm going to start calling it Tahoma instead.

I don't know if there's a font called Rainier but if there is, it's probably not as good as Tahoma.

[hotdogPi]

Rename it Mount Snowier.

[formulanone]

Looks like Google found their copy of Shibboleths for Complete Dickheads

(Ephraimites may consult their version of Sibbolets for Complete Disheads.)

[Bobby5280]

I don't know if there's a font called Rainier but if there is, it's probably not as good as Tahoma.

Kimmy Design has a 9 font type familiy called Rainier. It's not a general purpose sans typeface like Tahoma. The style is more decorative from a rustic angle. Rainier has an impressive character set though; each font has between 2600 and 2900 glyphs, depending on the style.

I'm not all that fond of Tahoma. It looks like a derivative offshoot of Verdana.

[pderocco]

Maybe Trump will rename Denali National Park to McKinley National Park.

[Molandfreak]

In the meantime, https://www.aaroads.com/aamaps/ uses the OSM dataset and thus will say Gulf of Mexico so long as OSM does.

TIL about the ferry from Mobile to Coatzacoalcos. Huh.

[kkt]

It's Route 128, the Sears Tower, and the Gulf of Mexico.

One difference being that it's within Massachusetts power to renumber their highways, and within the power of whoever owns the Sears Tower to rename it.  It's not within the president's power to rename geographical features that are not entirely within the United States.

[LilianaUwU]

In the meantime, https://www.aaroads.com/aamaps/ uses the OSM dataset and thus will say Gulf of Mexico so long as OSM does.

Crossing our fingers that no one at OSM makes the stupid mistake of following the President's orders.

[bandit957]

In the meantime, https://www.aaroads.com/aamaps/ uses the OSM dataset and thus will say Gulf of Mexico so long as OSM does.

Crossing our fingers that no one at OSM makes the stupid mistake of following the President's orders.

I think there was already an edit war regarding Denali, and the right name won out.

[kkt]

Mount McKinley was named by a McKinley supporting gold prospector at a time when Alaskans had no say on the matter. It's a completely arbitrary name, unlike Denali which has a history going back many centuries.

I don't think anybody is denying that.

Mount Rainier is named after a friend of the British Royal Navy captain who sailed by and noticed it one day.  That doesn't mean I'm going to start calling it Tahoma instead.

The thing about Mt. Rainier is that had several different tribes around it, and they used different variations of the name with no one dominating.  Rainier is the first name in general agreement by all the people living around it.

[Scott5114]

I'm not all that fond of Tahoma. It looks like a derivative offshoot of Verdana.

Tahoma was released two years before Verdana.

In the meantime, https://www.aaroads.com/aamaps/ uses the OSM dataset and thus will say Gulf of Mexico so long as OSM does.

Crossing our fingers that no one at OSM makes the stupid mistake of following the President's orders.

From what Minh was saying on Discord, it sounds pretty unlikely that OSM will go that route. (You've been around wiki editors enough to know that they tend to reflexively react to any sort of display of government fiat, regardless of which government, with something like "fuck you, make me".)

[Molandfreak]

It was Mount McKinley my whole life, so to me it just feels like going back to what it always was.

The point is "Mount McKinley" is not the name that mountain has "always" had, as your earlier comment implied.

Key phrase highlighted in bold.

The real, original name was "Denali" and was set that way long before you, I or even William McKinley were ever born.

Before I was born, I never called it anything.  Denali was not its name on any map I ever looked at growing up.  Denali was not its name as I was taught in school.  It was only ever Mount McKinley to me, for ¾ of my life.  This matters, as to what name seems right in my mind.

The Alaska state government had been officially calling that mountain "Denali" decades before the Obama administration made an official federal change.

I'm not in the Alaska state government, nor do I live in Alaska, nor do I use maps published by the Alaska state government, so that has had no bearing on me.


Look, I'm not saying Mount McKinley is the morally acceptable name for the mountain.  It's just a big hunk of rock in a state I've never been to, so I really don't care one way or the other.  But 'someone else called it such-and-such first' isn't really a persuasive argument to get me to call something by a name I didn't grow up using.

Similarly, if the Canadian government were to officially change the name of Hudson Bay to Wînipekw, I'd still call it Hudson Bay.

Considering that you have never visited the state or mountain, how much did you actually use the name Mount McKinley growing up? For me, the only time I can remember using it was in geography quizzes, and then both "Denali" and "Mount McKinley" were acceptable answers referring to the mountain. I suppose I got used to calling it Denali because that is the preferred name among Discovery Channel shows set in Alaska which I would frequently watch.

Though I am a Minnesotan, I never had a special connection to Bde Maka Ska before it was renamed. Since I had probably only uttered the phrase "Lake Calhoun" fewer than 10 times in my life, I had no problem switching to calling it Bde Maka Ska and think it's a much more interesting name anyway.

[LilianaUwU]

In the meantime, https://www.aaroads.com/aamaps/ uses the OSM dataset and thus will say Gulf of Mexico so long as OSM does.

Crossing our fingers that no one at OSM makes the stupid mistake of following the President's orders.

From what Minh was saying on Discord, it sounds pretty unlikely that OSM will go that route. (You've been around wiki editors enough to know that they tend to reflexively react to any sort of display of government fiat, regardless of which government, with something like "fuck you, make me".)

I mean, yeah. Just look at the Asian News International stuff.

[formulanone]

Considering that you have never visited the state or mountain, how much did you actually use the name Mount McKinley growing up?

This this this

[LilianaUwU]

Considering that you have never visited the state or mountain, how much did you actually use the name Mount McKinley growing up?

I never heard of Denali before this, so never for either name.

[bandit957]

Encyclopaedia Britannica has announced they will continue to call it the Gulf of Mexico.

[kernals12]

I think it's pretty obvious why Apple and Google are doing this: to stroke our President's ego.

[kernals12]

Off topic, but...

The big mountain near me was called Nuvagantu by the Southern Paiute, which means "where the snow sits". And indeed it's about the only place in Southern Nevada you can find snow if you want it. The first white guy to climb it was from Charleston, South Carolina, so he called it Mount Charleston.

I think it makes a lot more sense to name it something that has to do with the mountain itself than some city a few thousand miles away which, other than this one guy, doesn't have much cultural overlap with the area.

But if I were to start calling it Nuvagantu (which is a much cooler sounding name) nobody would know what I was talking about. (And if I started calling NV 159 Nuvagantu Boulevard even fewer people would know what I'm on about.)

Speaking of Nevada, are people still calling it "McCarran Airport"?

[Scott5114]

Speaking of Nevada, are people still calling it "McCarran Airport"?

I'm afraid I wouldn't know, sorry. (I still don't really have many local friends, and the airport hasn't come up in small talk with any strangers.)

[Molandfreak]

Speaking of Mt. Charleston, holy buckets Vegas has grown. I remember when I visited 10 years ago, NV 157 had an at-grade intersection with US 95 that felt like it was in the middle of nowhere. Even the northernmost parts of CC-215 felt rural. Now you can see development happening a little bit beyond NV 157 in google earth.