What's in a name (yet again)

Two newspapers (including this one) call a road connecting Cebu City to Mandaue City via the port area as Sergio Osmeña Boulevard. Another newspaper calls it S. Osmeña Road. This road is about to be closed partly for repairs. But that is not the issue. The issue is how the road is really called.

In this country, not just in this city, whenever you mention the name Osmeña, it invariably refers to the late president Sergio Osmeña Sr. There is a reason for this. Of all the Osmeñas in this country, only Sergio Osmeña Sr. reached the top of the pecking order. As president, he was the most historically significant.

That is why the most important road in the city, which stretches from the Capitol to Fuente Osmeña on to the Basilica del Santo Niño near City Hall and then to Plaza Independencia, is called Osmeña Boulevard. It doesn't have his first name Sergio on it but everybody knows it refers to him -- the Grand Old Man of Cebu.

Now here is this other road, variously referred to as Sergio Osmeña Boulevard and S. Osmeña Road. Without a qualifier as to whether it refers to the Junior (a son who made only up to senator) or the Senior, the logical inference would be that it refers to the most prominent and deserving -- the president, Sergio Sr.

But as had been said, there is already an Osmeña Boulevard that refers to the Senior. How can there be another Osmeña Boulevard that, even with a Sergio preceding it, has to be taken to mean the Senior in the absence of any qualification to the contrary. What does that make of us then but a city confused?

This paper has tried to take issue with this several times already, not to nitpick, but to make things clear and precise, ambiguity and confusion not being a hallmark of a major city as big and as important as ours. But city officials, including the city mayor, either do not care or just do not get it.

And that is a sad thing because failure to differentiate between the significant and the obscure is a hallmark of a leadership that is mediocre. Just because confusion over a name theatens no life or causes no hunger and is therefore not a populist and vote-getting initiative, officials just let the matter go.

Well, the mediocre are correct. Nobody dies from a confusing road name. People do not faint from hunger splitting hair over the matter. Let us keep on with the folly. After all, we will only be known after the unrectified past comes back to haunt us. No wonder our city has steadily been slipping.