https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/arti ... ed-replace
The Brecon Beacons national park has been renamed Bannau Brycheiniog. Cue outrage from one Harry Mount, which sounds like it should be rhyming slang for something nasty. In fact he appears to be a relative of David Cameron, former Bullingdonian, failed lawyer, right wing commentator and professional contrarian.
In June 2013, Bloomsbury published The Wit and Wisdom of Boris Johnson, edited and introduced by Mount.
Anyway, he's not a fan of the change. For, erm, reasons. It's quite a patchy argument, boiling down to "It's a bit more difficult for me to pronounce".
Park bosses also argue that the change to a Welsh name promotes the area's culture and heritage. Fair enough, but why not keep the English name we all know the area by alongside the Welsh? That would be too reasonable, of course. It is now to be known officially only by its Welsh name.
There's then a dig at Michael Sheen (for reasons), and the standard "how much is this costing?" whine.
And so this national park has been condemned to be known as something both unpronounceable and unmemorable.......Catchy it is not. Indeed, I would bet a pound to a penny that it will go the way of Uluru, the Aboriginal name for Ayers Rock, that conspicuously failed to gain traction in Australia following its introduction in 1993.
Fuck right off part one. Uluru is gaining in use, and at least white Australia is for the most part trying to make amends for its past treatment of aboriginal cultures.
Only a literal-minded, cold-hearted fool would insist that our miraculous, lovely place names — many of which date back over 2,000 years to a time before the Romans turned up — should be dull, meticulously correct references to a place's history and geography.
But the crashingly dull wokerati refuse to accept how powerfully evocative they are to people who've used them all their lives, have heard them said by their parents and grandparents, and read them in centuries-old books.
Fuck right off part 2 - as someone who did a fucking dissertation on place names in the Welsh marches (true!) I can tell you that the proportion of place names in the UK that date to before the Roman occupation is between fuck and all, and what can be traced back that far is exclusively Celtic.
Also, note that he's using the appeal to familiarity here. Thousands of years old, evocative, grandad's knee.
The mountains were originally called the Brecknock Beacons in the 18th century. Yes, they were known as Bannau Brycheiniog before that, in the 16th century, as defenders of the name change will tell you at length.
But to turn the clock back 500 years is as nuts as the decision last year by the Snowdonia National Park to use the Welsh name Yr Wyddfa for the mountain we all think of as Mount Snowdon.
In 50 years of visiting the Brecon Beacons, I've never heard them referred to as Bannau Brycheiniog. And what of Brecon, the beautiful market town that lies at the foot of the Brecon Beacons? Are the name-changing zealots going to change its name to Brycheiniog, too?
Ted Heath's loopy Local Government Act of 1972. It replaced the ancient, harmonious names of Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire, for example, which were incorporated into one vast county called Dyfed.
Names such as Dyfed, Powys and Gwent predate Brecknockshire, Carmarthenshire and Monmouthshire, cunt chops.
80 %
