EDITORIAL - What's in a name? Everything and nothing

An official of Monterazzas de Cebu wrote in a few days ago to request rectification of news reports that had Monterazzas as the address of a woman arrested by police for being a drug dealer.

The request is justified and understandable. How can anyone claim Monterazzas as an address when it is still under development? There are still no houses in that residential enclave up in the hills to speak of.

The culprit for the slip-up was of course the police who, for lack of any accurate info on the place, placed the address of the woman drug dealer as Monterazzas, her house being on the road leading to the subdivision.

What complicated the problem was that the media, which should have known better, did not have the kind of initiative that was any better than that of the police. So they perpetuated the error by simply copying what was on the blotter, a common enough practice.

On the other hand, it is difficult to blame police and media entirely since Filipinos as a people have never been known for greatness when it comes to naming places. We all have the tendency to name everything with everything that comes to mind with no regard for context.

Now, this tendency can be good and it can be bad. It can be serious and it can be funny. One thing for sure, it being in our blood, we should all learn to take such tendency with a great big grain of salt.

For instance, one of the early high-end residential addresses in Cebu is Maria Luisa. Yet there are people who live in the peripheries who cannot help but also carry that address, to the consternation of subdivision residents and the confusion of letter carriers.

There is that famous "dirty spoon" carenderia specializing in "tinola and mais nga kan-on" that grew famous on the name of its next door neighbor, a hardware dealer. Eventually the carenderia moved elsewhere but carried with it the name of, what else, but the neighbor.

Junquera, on the other hand, is one address residents use only by force of circumstance and not out of love, pride or anything else. Force of circumstance may one day also make some Liloan residents take Amara as an address even if, like in Maria Luisa, they are outsiders.