The Ministry of Civil Affairs of the People’s Republic of China asked local authorities to act prudently and appropriately in a campaign against improper geographic names. Relevant regulations and guidelines of the campaign should be strictly observed to prevent the campaign from being expanded in an arbitrary manner, said the ministry.

The focus of the campaign is names of newly built residential areas and major projects, which had a negative social impact and stirred strong public reactions. Launched in December 2018, the campaign mainly targets four types of improper toponyms, including those featuring exaggeration, unrelated foreign elements, strange vulgar words and repetitive names. The campaign is an important measure to improve the management of geographic names and promote the fine cultural tradition embedded in such names.

This Wall Street Journal article looks at the trend of Southern American schools changing their name from “Robert E. Lee” to, well, any other “Lee” or similar name.

Many school districts are wrestling with sometimes contentious debates over being named for Confederate figures, while also facing tight budgets. The solution, they are finding, can be picking someone with a similar name. Districts began naming schools for Confederate figures after the Civil War, with an uptick in the 1950s and 1960s. Several dozen school districts have dropped Confederate school names in recent years.

In the Houston Independent School District, officials changed a school named for Confederate soldier Sidney Lanier to the late Bob Lanier, a former mayor of the city. The Austin school district’s Robert E. Lee Elementary is now Russell Lee Elementary, named for a Depression-era photographer.

Oklahoma City Public Schools wasn’t sure whether its Lee Elementary was even named for Robert E. Lee, because the school never carried the full name. But after the 2017 discovery of board minutes from the early 1900s that listed a portrait of Robert E. Lee as a gift to the school, officials figured the school must be named for the Confederate general. It changed the name to Adelaide Lee, after an Oklahoma philanthropist, in 2018.

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NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, now rests on Hidden Figures Way. The street was renamed in June 2019 in honor of Katherine Johnson, the late Dorothy Vaughan and the late Mary Jackson, three women who helped put astronaut John Glenn in orbit by calculating his flight trajectory by hand.

Hidden Figures is the name of Margot Lee Shetterly’s book on the subject, as well as a movie. Both the book and movie tell the story of not only the work the women did, but also the challenges that black women faced at NASA in the 1960s.

“Here we are, 50 years after the landing of the Apollo 11 Moon lander, celebrating those figures who were, at the time, not celebrated,” NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said at the ceremony.

Onomatophobia means an abnormal dread of certain words or names because of their supposed significance. It is also a kind of the fear of hearing particular names.

The origin of the words onomato (meaning word) and phobia  (meaning fear) is Greek. Onomatophobia is considered to be a specific phobia. Onomatophobia is also related to Nomatophobia (fear of names), Logophobia and Verbophobia (which both mean the fear of words). Many specific phobias can be traced back to a specific triggering person, event, usually a traumatic experience at an early age. Treatment includes cognitive and behavioral therapy. These people are taught not to react in a certain way to a particular name.

That happened to some Californians in 2017, when Google Maps changed the moniker of three San Francisco neighborhoods. Given the extensive reach that Google has in the transmission of geographic data, through Google Maps and its geospatial analysis software Google Earth Engine, the name quickly spread and was adopted by other businesses. But residents decried the change.

There are many reasons why someone might want to change their neighborhoods name, but what’s driving current name-changing initiatives carried out by big businesses with little or no personal connection to the places they rename? Raechel A. Portelli, as a geographer at the Michigan State University, discusses three main driving forces.