Saturday, 9 April 2005

More than a mouthful is a waste

Jackson isn’t the only city that’s dealing with honoring a civil rights legend by renaming its airport; Maryland legislators are currently working on legislation to rename Baltimore-Washington International Airport (which more serves Baltimore than Washington, since it’s a pain in the butt to get to downtown Washington from the north, but that’s neither here nor there) to honor deceased supreme court justice Thurgood Marshall.

Which is all well and good, but the current compromise name, “Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport,” has the word “international” in exactly the wrong place; it modifies “airport,” not “Thurgood Marshall.” Heck, if Newark and Washington National survived their name changes to include geographically-nonspecific nonsense, I think BWI would get along just fine as Thurgood Marshall International. Besides which, TMI would be a really great airport code.