Washington’s third airport, Baltimore-Washington International Airport, may be renamed after Thurgood Marshall. Now, I didn’t think much of the man, but he was an important historical figure born in Baltimore and so naming something after him would be perfectly routine.

Except that the airport already has a name, commonly referred to as BWI. Renaming things is profoundly unconservative, and should be undertaken only in the most extreme cases, such as certain geographical features in the South whose formal names included the N-word. It is a sign of revolutionary change, such as St. Petersburg becoming Leningrad (and back to St. Petersburg), or Constantinople to Istanbul, or Pretoria to Thswane, or Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City,

We’ve done a lot of renaming of airports in this country, because it’s one of the few big things politicians have power to rename. Neither Jack Kennedy’s nor Ronald Reagan’s names should have been added to the already-existing names of airports. In fact, BWI’s name was already changed once — for its first 30 years, it was called Friendship Airport, not as a marketing ploy for Charm City but because it was built near the crossroads of Friendship Church, itself named after an actual church. One name change is enough.

And don’t even get me started on naming things after living politicians, like the George Bush Center for Intelligence (known to ordinary mortals as the CIA) or the Robert C. Byrd Federal Courthouse.