Naming Conventions and Death in Paradise

Whenever we travel to Northern CA, and specifically when we visit the house where my Dad grew up (in which his sister and her family still live), we drive up Aguilar Drive. This is a point of contention for my family (which is not named Aguilar), because it was my grandfather who built the first house up that way, and who created the road now bearing the other family's name. When it comes down to it, the Aguilars simply thought to give the road a name before my family did.

Of course, just because a name already exists on a place doesn't mean that name has to stay that way forever. Just look at the recent brouhaha surrounding the Gulf of Mexico/America (oddly enough, I've not heard anywhere near as much back-and-forth regarding Mt. McKinley/Denali). In one sense, I suppose that anyone can rename anything whatever and whenever they want. It's just a matter of getting others to use the name you want them to use.

What's especially interesting to me is when competing names for a single space are made to co-exist, simply because both sides have a claim to the name, and neither is keen to relinquish the name they prefer. I was made aware of one such example on the British mystery program, Death in Paradise, some years ago. 

Death in Paradise has been on for over a decade now, and has run through several lead detectives in that time. The show takes place in a fictional island nation in the Caribbean with both French and English heritage, and one of its main conceits is the fact that the lead detective is from the United Kingdom, who finds himself out of his comfort zone, while the rest of the police force grew up on or around the island (notwithstanding the fact that the actors playing them tend also to be from the UK, or perhaps France).

There is perhaps some latent racism in the concept, for which the show gets some criticism, but for the most part, that's a discussion for another time. Getting back to the topic of naming rights, I'm thinking about the first lead on Death in Paradise, a rather uptight detective named Richard Poole, played by Ben Miller. Whether or not Poole qualifies as a "racist" in the sense of how he treats people of color, he definitely does in the sense of assuming that the people of this island nation are "backwards," and he seems to have a compulsive hatred of all things French. 

This comes out in the last episode of the second season, "A Deadly Party," in a discussion with DS^* Camille Bordey (played by Sara Martins) about the English Channel, which francophone Bordey prefers to call "la Manche" (a name I confess I'd never heard before seeing this episode, and which apparently translates into English as "the sleeve," more or less describing the shape of the channel), and I have learned in the decade since I first saw the episode that other languages more or less adapt the French name/concept as opposed to the English one. Since the waters essentially separate England and France, there's room for debate which nation has a more legitimate claim. They simply call it what they want to.

What does that mean for our current geographic naming disputes? Probably not much. Only that time will tell whether current trends hold sway when political fortunes inevitably change in the years to come.

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^*(that's "Detective Sergeant" for non-British audiences. By the way, Poole's rank is "DI," short for "Detective Inspector")