From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame

As the title of this slight but engaging treatise on the politics of place names indicates, a sufficiently detailed gazetteer offers plenty of material to rile up minorities, feminists and persons of refined sensibility. Geographer Monmonier (Spying with Maps) gets a lot of mileage out of typing provocative words into a U.S. Geological Survey database and picking through the resulting ethnic slurs, body parts and scatological imprecations. The Rocky Mountain and Pacific Coast states, with their ripe mining-camp history, offer up the most offensive place names, but even staid Newfoundland has a village named Dildo situated next to Spread Eagle Bay. The author delves into the efforts of the Federal Government's Board on Geographic Names to sanitize uncouth toponyms, a task that requires delicate attention to racial and cultural sensitivities, often complicated by cries of political correctness from citizens proud of their off-color local landmarks. He goes on to examine the politics of map names in conflict zones like Cyprus and Israel and ongoing scientific and international squabbles over naming features of Antarctica, the ocean floor and the Moon. Although general readers will find much of the procedural and bureaucratic details of official place-naming arcane, they will enjoy a trove of giggle-inducing lore. Photos.