It is All in the Name or in the Initials

When will you ever learn the lesson?
Letters are a tool of oppression.
When it is initials you use,
We are the people that you abuse.

Please do not dare to shorten my name.
No! We will not let you play that game.
And to Prince George's we are smitten.
Use P.G. and we will not listen.

Albert Einstein is credited with the observation that only two things are infinite, the universe and stupidity and he was not sure about the universe.

Prince George's County is an affluent county in suburban Maryland east of and adjacent to Washington, D.C. The enormous physical area of the county is only matched by the depth of its inferiority complex. Prince George's County has a strong rural tradition that once relied heavily on agriculture in general and tobacco in particular. As the size of the federal government grew during the 1930's and exploded during the post World War II era, most of the early population growth went north into Montgomery County.

For most of its history, Prince George's was a dominantly white county. As middle class blacks fled the political collapse of Washington D.C., many could only afford to move to Prince George's County. They changed the complexion of the county. Prince George's County now boasts one of the largest concentrations of middle class and wealthy African-Americans in the country. Employment centers like the University of Maryland and NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center make Prince George's County a high tech growth area. Nonetheless, the lingering notion of Prince George's County as a backwater combined with the sensitivities associated with race give some in Prince George's County comic irritability. The feared stereotype is that Montgomery County is for the rich and sophisticated, while Prince George's is bucolic and poor.

This inferiority complex is manifested as a hypersensitivity about an abbreviation. For the political elite in Prince George's County, reference to the county as "P.G. County," the shortening of its name, is an insult. Most county residents are happily unaware of the slight and promiscuously refer to the county as P.G. However, the County Council President Dorothy Bailey objects so strenuously to the use of P.G. that when people make budget requests at council meetings she says, "by the third time they say 'P.G.,' I've lost whatever the request was."

The Washington Post quotes Bailey as saying, "We want the old image out, the image of rural, uneducated unsafe people riding around in pickup trucks with pistols. We're as cosmopolitan as we want to be, and we are as urban as we want to be."

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