Coordinated attacks

Wow. Check out these headlines:

Train bombs in Mumbai kill 147
Explosions hit Bombay commuter trains

Pretty much simultaneous attacks in both Mumbai and Bombay! I haven't been this stunned at the daily news since Beijing won the 2008 Olympics (Peking seemed like a shoo-in at the time).

Why is it that during our generation the Anglicization of place names has to change decade by decade? And notice that we usually get beat over the head with the new forms by pseudo-intellectual elite wannabes, like the news correspondents that went to Qatar before Gulf War II and told us it wasn't Kay-tahr anymore, it was "Gutter". However metaphorically true that may have been, if you telephoned the Qatar embassy in Washington D.C. they still pronounced it "Kay-tahr". Who do you trust, the multilingual native Qatari or the cue-card reader with the authoritative hair?

I strongly suspect that the acceleration of English transliteration changes is a direct result of some forty years of worshipful obeisance to multicultural pieties and the corresponding reduction of confidence in Western conventions. By way of example, about as quickly as Saigon fell and Jimmy Carter was elected cringer-in-chief, my world atlas changed Cambodia to Kampuchea. Of course, the name change was driven partly by the fact that the Khmer Rouge had wiped out the military regime that had exiled the monarchy, but the diplomats and intelligentsia of a truly self-confident world power would've kept calling the place Cambodia anyway. If, on the other hand, you have no confidence in the importance of your own culture and find revolutionary, genocidal whack-jobs enchanting, you'll roll over and enthusiastically adopt the new appellation.

Unintentionally hilarious postscript: The USA Today headline above which was originally "Bombay" on the website was later changed to "Mumbai". Heaven forbid that USA Today's media peers would have noticed the "Bombay" gaffe and thought them unsophisticated!