On my way to the dentist in the middle of the day not long ago, I heard Philip Reeves—a Briton, by the sound of him—on National Public Radio interviewing an Indian gentleman whose name I didn’t catch about the terrorist massacre in the latter’s country last Thanksgiving-tide. The Indian spoke English with the sort of aristocratic British accent that you never hear in Britain anymore. Even the Queen doesn’t speak so “posh.” He was saying that for anyone born and raised, as he was, in Bombay, the sight of the slaughter at the Victoria railway terminus there was particularly traumatic. Now the English-speaking Western media had, in the wake of the disaster, allowed an occasional mention of the Victoria terminus because its Indian name, Chhatrapati Shivaji (after a seventeenth-century Maratha champion of the Hindus against the Mughals), is practically unpronounceable. But Mr. Reeves seemed annoyed by the Indian’s comments and took them up with an insistent mention of the feelings in Mumbai or—as he added with a peevish reference back to his interlocutor—“‘Bombay,’ as he calls it …”

Bombay, indeed, as every English speaker once called it, until the “diversity” craze took hold and persuaded the panjandra of the media that it was somehow offensive to people who speak other languages for us to use our own, and in particular certain well-established English names for places in certain countries—or for the countries themselves in the case of the ridiculous “Myanmar” (or Burma as it was known