Such a critique seems trivial insofar as it's the situation that makes a technology good or bad. Plumbing is good when it solves an otherwise messy p… - Mark Monmonier

Not only is it easy to lie with maps, it is essential. To portray meaningful relationships for a complex, three-dimensional world on a flat sheet of paper or screen, a map must distort reality.

Publication of my commentary in the Communications from Readers section might be one way for The American Cartographer to affirm a commitment to openness, and to demonstrate once again that efforts to stifle dissenting opinion tend to backfire.

A final caveat: because this book is intended for general readers, academic geographers will notice little reference here to poststructural critical theorists, who've said much about maps in recent years but little about toponyms. Simply put, I've not found their work particularly useful, especially when tedious regurgitation of Foucault crowds out case studies and fosters gratuitous assumptions about power and impact.