Another School Denaming

 The Return of DWEM Days
   A few years ago the winds of sanctimony blew in, mainly from the south. Statues were toppled and names disappeared from schools. My sons had attended Ryerson Public School which could not withstand the sanctimonious blast. Committees met, meetings were held and after considerable deliberation this captivating moniker was delivered: Old North Public School.
  There was an American casualty as well. The F.D. Roosevelt Public School became Forest City Public School because of “F.D. Roosevelt’s historical connection to racism and controversial approach to Jewish refugees during the Holocaust, which are inconsistent with the school board’s values and commitments to human rights and equity,” the school board said in a statement."
   More committees undoubtedly were needed to update the school signage, change the logos, toss the stationary and put down the mascots. Self-righteousness can be costly. 

A School Bell No Longer Peals for Pepys
  Although things have been relatively quiet here, over in England where the other London is located, a school has decided to take Pepys' name off of one of the houses on their campus. The image above came with this telling headline: "Cambridgeshire School Which Dropped Historic Sex Offender Samuel Pepys' Name Reveals Replacement Figurehead," Gemma Gad, Peterborough Telegraph, Mar.11, 2026. 
   "A Peterborough area school which dropped the name ‘Samuel Pepys’ after learning of the historic figure’s sex offences – has now chosen a replacement. Staff and students at Hinchingbrooke School, in Huntingdon, have voted Olivia Bernard Sparrow as the new figurehead for one of its pastoral houses."

  It is astonishing to learn that they just learned that Pepys could be problematic. It is also interesting that the students participated in the name change selection, a precedent which it would be prudent to not adopt. One hopes that Ms. Sparrow did not keep a diary. 
   Readers of MM will know that I cancelled my subscription to the Washington Post. Before doing so, I grabbed the following piece and will provide portions of it, since the author and I are in agreement about denaming:
  "Another Ludicrous Canceling of a Name From the Past: Shaming the Dead is an Asinine Culture Warriors' Pastime: Now Its the Great Diarist Samuel Pepys's Turn," Andrew Doyle, Feb. 9, 2026.
   "Samuel Pepys was, famously, an extraordinary diarist, offering a vivid first-hand account of life in Restoration England from 1660 to 1669....This squeamishness over the diaries has never gone away. Recently, Hinchingbrooke School in Cambridgeshire — where Pepys was an alumnus — decided that one of its pastoral houses should no longer bear his name. This is just the latest example of an institution rewriting or minimizing aspects of its own history to fulfill the moral expectations of the present day.....The shaming of the dead is one of the most asinine pastimes of today’s culture warriors."

   One of the uses for AI at WaPo, was for summarizing the comments made about the articles written. I found it useful, some readers did not. Here is what AI concluded from the over 1,150 comments about the Pepys' piece. 
   "The conversation explores the decision by Hinchingbrooke School to remove Samuel Pepys's name from one of its pastoral houses, with participants expressing a range of opinions on the broader implications of renaming buildings and the concept of "cancel culture." Some commenters argue that renaming is a necessary step to align with modern values and to stop honoring historical figures whose actions are now considered reprehensible. Others see it as an overreaction or a distraction from more pressing issues, suggesting that it is part of a broader trend of erasing history. The discussion also touches on comparisons with other historical figures, such as Woodrow Wilson, and the actions of the Trump administration in altering historical narratives. Overall, the comments reflect a debate on how society should handle the legacies of historical figures and the criteria for honoring them in public spaces."

Oh-oh or Uh-oh: Denaming on a Massive Scale
  In the province of Quebec there is an attempt to enforce laicity, an action with which I am mostly sympathetic. Sometimes, however, the scale of sanctimonious actions can be considerable. To wit: this article was in the paper yesterday:

"Remove Religious Names from 'Secular' Schools," Raphaël Melançon

London Free Press, March 17, 2026:

"Guaranteeing a truly religion-free school environment."...

But is it really a "religion-free environment" when your school, despite prohibiting its employees from displaying their faith, still bears the name of a Catholic saint?

  In the village where I grew up, near Joliette, the local elementary school is still called Sacré-Coeur-de-Jésus, carved into the stone facade of the building. Every morning, when children walk into their school, they see reminders of the profoundly religious past of their community.

   And it is far from an isolated case. According to a list I compiled from various sources, out of nearly 2,000 public elementary schools in Quebec, more than 500 are named after a religious - most often Christian figure. That means more than one in four public elementary schools in this province bears the name of a saint, biblical figure or former prominent member of the clergy.....

"Secularism in our public institutions and schools is a non-negotiable principle," Drainville said to justify his government's recent decisions....

   But if the Education Ministry wants to be consistent with that same principle, it should start by examining how public schools across the province are named.

   And by doing so, it could get rid of relics of a long bygone religious past to bring the names of hundreds of our public schools into the 21st century."

  I will leave the conclusion to Twain:

   "We despise all reverences and all objects of reverence which are outside the pale of our list of sacred things. And yet, with strange inconsistency, we are shocked when other people despise and defile the things which are holy to us."

 The Bonus: 
  Those of you who are naughty and now curious about Pepys, can click on this link to his diary. What comes up is the diary entry for the day from about 365 years ago.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Daily Entries Form the 17th Century London Diary

The Washington Post

 Subscription Going Dark
   A few years ago, the Washington Post adopted the slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness", implying that newspapers were needed to shine light on the things we should know about. I have lamented the loss of so many of them, but I am now cancelling my subscription to the Post. The latest round of staff cuts announced earlier this month, was the deciding factor for me, although many of the good writers and a cartoonist had already left.
   I grew up in Maryland, across the Bay from Washington and went to university just outside the D.C. border. The very thick WaPo picked up very late on a Saturday night could help one through the worst of hangovers and last all day Sunday.
   A few years ago, I started subscribing because of a very good deal and kept subscribing when it wasn't. Apart from the fact that it was an excellent paper, I still enjoyed reading the regional coverage that included the Delmarva Peninsula. Since I submitted my cancellation, I have been asked to reconsider. I decided not to take advantage of a really good deal - $20. Apparently I have two hours left and I don't think the price is going lower. I will miss reading it. I will even miss George Will. 

BEZOSBUB
  Although some were upset when Jeff Bezos bought the Post in 2013, he did have a lot of money and some good intentions. Lately, however, some decisions were made that were questionable and even a cartoon was cancelled. The paper is now not supposed to favour a presidential candidate and the columnists have been encouraged to endorse "personal liberties and free markets", not bad things to endorse, but it is bad to be told to do so.
  The Post is losing money, but money is not the issue for Bezos. As Ruth Marcus, who quit in March, notes: "When Bezos purchased the Post, his net worth was about twenty-five billion; it is now an estimated two hundred fifty billion. Why not one per cent of that for the Post, enough to sustain the paper indefinitely? A pipe dream, I know, but this arrangement would make Bezos the savior of the Post, not the man who presided over its demise."

  To put this in nautical terms,  "among the Amazon founder’s more expensive recreations, [ he has a]125.8-metre, three-masted sailing yacht, Koru. (No need to get into the details of Abeona, the seventy-five-million-dollar “shadow boat” that trails Koru and provides a helipad and adequate space for extra staff.)
   "Koru cost an estimated five hundred million dollars. This is double what Bezos paid for the Washington Post. Annual maintenance runs tens of millions of dollars. It is, to be sure, a very special boat. According to Architectural Digest, “Bezos’s superyacht has a classical style, with a navy-blue steel hull and a two-level white aluminum superstructure. The ship’s teak decks include spots for outdoor lounging as well as three Jacuzzis and a swimming pool. Robb Report notes that the hull features traditional portholes, while the upper deck windows are smaller than typical, which might help to foil paparazzi trying to capture guests inside.” If that information about the boat is not galling enough, there is more: the Journal published a story on Friday by Richard Rubin headlined “Trump’s New Tax Law Saved Amazon Billions.” But the Ukraine correspondent had to go."
   Bezos founded Amazon, by the way. Perhaps now he is simply more interested in films than journalism since he reportedly contributed $40 million for "Melania" and spent another $35 million to promote it. 
   Whereas the New York Times purchased a company to cover sports, WaPo just fired everyone. Some were at the Olympics when they learned. Ron Charles who sent a very interesting book newsletter every Friday, was laid off and quickly became "an unemployed journalist with a mortgage". You can now find him on Substack, along with many other fine writers. The entire book section was shut down. Even if you were not a subscriber, you may have read the WaPo reviews that were syndicated.
   Most papers do not review books anymore and the Associated Press stopped doing so last year. The New York Times "Book Review" "is the last discrete newspaper books section standing." 
   There still are magazines that publish book reviews, but "The books section of a newspaper plays an altogether different role. It does not cater to aficionados; it seeks new recruits. A newspaper is—or ought to be—the opposite of an algorithm, a bastion of enlightened generalism in an era of hyperspecialization and personalized marketing. It assumes that there is a range of subjects an educated reader ought to know about, whether she knows that she ought to know about them or not."
And Amazon is not the answer:
   "On Amazon, the glorious inconvenience of browsing shelves or combing through piles has been eliminated. There is no occasion to pick up an unfamiliar book out of sheer curiosity. Every book that the site’s algorithm recommends is similar to one that you have purchased already. In this way, you encounter nothing but iterations of yourself forever. It is a world in which the customer is always right. But if you didn’t want to be proved wrong, if you didn’t want to be altered or antagonized in ways that you could never predict, why would you read at all?"
  To conclude with some CANCON, I will end with the word created by Cory Doctorow and say that this is just one more example of the enshittifcation of everything:
  "We’re all living through the enshittocene, a great enshittening, in which the services that matter to us, that we rely on, are turning into giant piles of shit."

Sources:
"The Death of Book World: What the Closing of the Washington Post’s Books Section Means for Readers," By Becca Rothfeld, The New Yorker, Feb. 10, 2026.
"How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post: The Amazon founder bought the paper to save it. Instead, with a mass layoff, he’s forced it into severe decline," Ruth Marcus, The New Yorker, Feb. 4, 2026. (The nautical bit is also from The New Yorker, by David Remnick, Feb.8.)
More about "enshittification" can be learned in MM's, "On Bullshit."
Post Script: I just received another offer to re-subscribe.

The Meaning of Magellan

What's Next: The Ceremonial Lynching of Linnaeus?

   The new old name on the long list of those to be erased is 'Magellan.'  Back in early October, his name showed up in many of those anniversary, "What happened on this date in history," articles with a text like this:

"1520: Ferdinand Magellan, Portuguese navigator, and his expedition team are blown by storms into a strait that separates South America from Tierra del Fuego and other islands south of the continent and that also connects the southern Atlantic and Pacific oceans. The strait now bears his name."
This month he is under attack and there are those who think that both the strait and the clouds in the sky which are also named after him, should be re-labelled. I am not sure what they think about all the other things named "Magellan" and if they are going to have to pull their investments from the Fidelity Magellan Fund.

   Once again, I will tack differently on this issue and continue the battle against the bowdlerizers, who everywhere seem to be in the ascendancy. I will add quickly, however, that Magellan was not a nice fellow, a fact that has been known for a few hundred years. Over those years, somehow most people were able to admire the man for his nautical achievements, be critical of his bad behaviour and not be traumatized by seeing his name on a globe. What name is next, or for that matter what word? Suppose one of the new linguistic puritans learns from the OED that their favourite and very useful word was coined by a colonizer, do we all have to lose it?

   Readers of MM will know my general position on the re-naming issues which I will attempt to briefly offer below, but I will say simply here that I don't think we should throw caution to the wind when it comes to the radical alteration of our vocabularies. 

 

The Throw Magellan Overboard Camp

   I will not attempt to interpret the arguments offered by those who want to see the word 'Magellan' disappear, but instead point you toward their arguments and the sources in which they are found. 

   Suprising to me is the fact the "Magellan Issue"  has been brought forward by those on the STEM side of campus. Perhaps they fear the citizens on the other side of the quad. Here you will find an entire essay on the subject: "The Magellanic Clouds Must Be Renamed, Astronomers Say: A Coalition of Over 50 Astronomers Is Calling to Rename the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds," Monisha Ravisetti, Space.com, Nov.3, 2023. Two major points seem to be that: 1) the author indicates that she is a "Filipino-American, and Magellan is an infamous figure in Filipino history, so this has always been at the back of my mind." , and 2) "The primary issue is that the clouds aren't his discovery." The Indigenous observers saw them first. 

   There will surely be more reactions, but here are a couple available now: "Violent Colonialist' Magellan is Unfit to Keep His Place in the Night Sky, Say Astronomers: Indigenous Peoples Already Had Their Own Names for the Galaxies Named After the 16th- Century Portuguese Explorer," The Guardian, Nov.12, 2023 and "Astronomers Request Retitling of Galaxies Named After 'Violent Colonialist' Explorer Magellan: Large and Small Magellanic Clouds Claimed to Have Been Discovered by Portuguese and His Crew in the 16th Century," Genevieve Holl-Allen, The Telegraph, Nov. 12. 2023. 

The Heretical Minority View (Mine)
   I will simply point you to two of my posts relating to this issue (there are more) and then offer my last defence. See, "Names on the Land", but avoid it if you are going to be injured by names like, "Squaw Tit" or "Whorehouse Meadow." The best writing in it is not mine and is taken from a book you should read before you make up your own mind on the matter - Names on the Land. In it, George R. Stewart writes that,

 The land has been named, and the names are rooted deep. Lake Mead may fill with silt, and Lake Michigan again spill south to the Gulf -- but the names may still remain. Let the conqueror come, or the revolution rage; many of our names have survived both already, and may again. Though the books should be burned and the people themselves be cut off, still from the names -- as from arrowheads and potsherds -- the patient scholar may piece together some record of what we were. 

  Another pertinent post is (spoiler alert), "No More Name Changing" and in it you will learn about "Awful Anna" the hummingbird that the American Ornithological Society is going to kill. If you think all those old bird names need to go, you have an ally in Margaret Renkl, who wrote this article yesterday: "North American Birds Will No Longer Be Named For Racists - or Anybody Else," New York Times, Nov. 13, 2023. That this hummingbird was named for someone's wife does not keep me awake at night and it is likely that the new one will not sound much better.

  If it is decided that one solution for improving names is applying ones that are more descriptive, it will work very well for most birds, unless they are homely, in which case, care must be taken. Sacrificing colourful or contentious names on the landscape or in the heavens will result in areas that are linguistically blighted and devoid of historical references.

  Enough energy has been expended on this issue, if not much thought given. My side in this debate is expressed in the first lines in the poem, "American Names" by Stephen Vincent Benét who expresses sentiments similar to those of George R. Stewart quoted and bolded above. Given the current zeitgeist, this debate is likely to continue, but I think I will no longer be a participant. 

                                              American Names

I have fallen in love with American names,

The sharp names that never get fat,

The snakeskin-titles of mining-claims,

The plumed war-bonnet of Medicine Hat,

Tucson and Deadwood and Lost Mule Flat.

......

I shall not rest quiet in Montparnasse.

I shall not lie easy at Winchelsea.

You may bury my body in Sussex grass,

You may bury my tongue at Champmédy.

I shall not be there. I shall rise and pass.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

    I included the last lines as well and you will recognize among them, the final one which has been bolded. The questions now being considered by those of you concerned about such things are: Should the writings of Stephen Vincent Benét be delisted from curricula because of his reactionary liking of established names? Should the non-Indigenous Dee Brown be cancelled because of his appropriation of such a subject for his book with that title? And should Buffy Sainte-Marie be further vilified for borrowing the phrase from either Brown or Benét, a dead old white male American poet? I suggest that the excessive focus on identity is about as useful for the geographers as it is for the political theorists. Genug Shoyn.