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What's In a Name?
Author: TriSec    Date: 05/11/2015 02:02:15

"Would John Kennedy be John Kennedy if he had been born "Mortimer Dipthong?"
- Milo Bloom


You're all familiar with the scouting "unit" - Cub Scout Packs, Boy Scout Troops, Venture Crews, and so on.

All the units in neighboring communities are organized into a "district", and several districts in the local area make up a "council".

My own council, being Boston Minuteman, has just merged with our neighbor to the north, being Yankee Clipper. (Both existing councils are also products of mergers.)

In any case, the long-awaited new council name was rolled out late last week.

Take a look at this map of eastern Massachusetts:

http://media.wickedlocal.com/patriotledger/photos/boston-eastern-massachusetts-traffic-map.jpg


The new council encompasses everything inside the highway marked "128", including Boston Proper. Further, everything north and east of Route 3 up to the New Hampshire border is now a part of the new council.

So let's think about a name for a minute. All these cities and towns are now a part of the new council. These are places that are known by every American...although in some cases I've added something a little more obscure.

On the North Shore, we've got Salem and their witches and whaling. A little further south is my hometown of Saugus, home of the Saugus Ironworks, the birthplace of steel. Of course there's Boston itself, I shouldn't have to enumerate the many hundreds of historical things that happened there.

I now live in Waltham - the industrial revolution was born here, as we're the site of the first integrated textile mill in the world...raw material went in one end, and finished products came out the other. This spread to the more well-known mill town of Lowell.

Then there's Lexington and Concord, the Battle Road, and the birthplace of the whole thing.

Four presidents came from here, although many more than that matriculated at Harvard...Dr. Martin Luther King also came here to Boston University. Never mind this city's contributions to medicine, science, and the arts.

Let's think about geography for a minute...of course, there's the sea and Massachusetts Bay. Up north, the mighty Merrimack River powered that previously mentioned industrial revolution. The River Charles and our beloved dirty water winds 80 miles through the heart of the new district, and think about Great Blue Hill in the southern part - it's the highest coastal drumlin in the US at 635 feet, lies in a magnificent reservation that is one of the largest undeveloped tracts of lands within 10 miles of a major US city, and is home to the Blue Hills weather observatory. When your local station says something hasn't happened "since the start of recorded weather history", they mean here.

In short, I could go to a scouting event in West Tebeakesse and say I was from "Boston Minuteman Council", and everyone would know where it was and what the name might have represented.

So what have we named the new council? After weeks of meetings, the powers that be have chosen....."The Spirit of Adventure" council.

Cornbread. Complete cornbread. With everything I just enumerated, we get the most bland, boring, uninspiring, meaningless corporate name of all time.

I posted this earlier on the book of face without context, but here it is again:



So, the merge will proceed, we'll continue to serve the youth of this Commonwealth...but I think we've just been saddled with "Mortimer Dipthong".
 

3 comments (Latest Comment: 05/11/2015 13:21:08 by Scoopster)
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