hill now mountain

Last week three hikers turned a hill in Whales into a mountain.  The Mynydd Craig Goch Hill was noted to be 2,000 feet short of mountain status for over 200 years.  But John Barnard, Myrddyn Phillips, and Graham Jackson, with borrowed equipment, surveyed the land and discovered that the hill was in fact a mountain, with 6 inches to spare.  This is now Whales' first mountain, with hope of boosting tourism.

 

The act of labeling affects much in this case of renaming an area formerly another identity.  The thought that it will boost tourism isn't an incorrect statement, because it definitely has the potential to do so.  The ideas that are associated with a mountain are definitely powerful and will be a good tool for advertising.  Yet, even though the area hasn't physically changed much in the past years, it's new name of "mountain" changes its identity and way others view it.  The way we label and call things affects the ways we react to them, sometimes unknowingly.  It's unfortunate that tourism will grow now that something is labeled differently, yet it wasn't able to hold itself as an interesting tourist spot until it got that mountain status.

 

This raises more questions.  What in our society has a label that isn't correct with it's identity, or is it's identity defined by strictly a name that someone gave it?  Could there be multiple uses for certain things but labeling causes us to only see them a certain way, therefore missing out on their full potential?