The Name Game

If there were actually some sort of ring to Cancer Survivor's Park or if we actually wanted to call a skate spot that, I'm still confidant that we'd deny the spot the official name and come up with something more palatable, something, anything else. Something it was already called: The Fed, or the Old Fed, if we must be technical.

A read I'd wanted to read escaped my time at the shop today but I picked it back up this evening, with the girl asleep, nobody in Northeast for more fun endeavors and The Playoffs over, for the night. Read Errol Morris' What's in a Name? if you have the time, because it's long. What I drew out of it was something like this. He quotes John Stuart Mill and the quote is this: “Proper names are attached to the objects themselves, and are not dependent upon the continuance of any attribute of the object.”

The reason this all comes up is because of the previous post about The Roofs. The elegance of the spot name, the basic descriptiveness of it, was all I need to have to think about the subject of the article linked above and the transigence of spot names. Even rendered unskateable, The Roofs are the roofs, even the ledges section, because that's just what they are. The ledges could be all that's left, and still, The Roofs. The Fed is The Fed to older dudes because it can never be anything else, even when most of the old granite is now grass and it has the bummer name and the most recognizable obstacle is a 10-stair rail and not curbs and flatground and mellow steps (Any federal business has moved down nearer to the river). Gold Rail and Reliastar and Pilsbury; the new name never replaces the old official but nothing is dependent on the continuace of any attribution of the object, or the new name, because the spot seems to stay the same, one way or the other.