News consumers in Oregon might have been momentarily confused last week when the stories came in of a series of terror attacks by gunmen in India. Mumbai? Where the heck is that?

The attacks took place, as you no doubt discovered within seconds, in a place everybody used to know by name. With 14 million people it is the second biggest city in th world. With its suburbs it is has more than 19 million people and qualifies as one of the biggest metro areas. It is a well known global trading center with a deep harbor, and for centuries the world knew it as Bombay.

Speakers of the regional language in that area, though, had always pronounced it Mumbai, and in 1996 India made the change official.

Now, the people in India can call their towns anything they want. What is puzzling is why the rest of the world routinely goes along with any such change?

The same thing happened when the ancient country of Burma suddenly became Myanmar. Some years before that, English speakers changed the name of the capital of China. Peking had always been pronounced Beijing, and all of a sudden we started spelling it that way too.

After the Vietnam War, the southern capital was renamed after Ho Chi Minh, but as a recent magazine reported, local residents still call it Saigon.

Tradition also dies hard in other places, and that's a good thing. Like everyone else, The Times of London reported the attacks in India last week. And it said they took place in Bombay. (hh)