The ‘Greater’ picture
Up until four years ago, Taipei City, Taichung City, Tainan City and Kaohsiung City existed alongside Taipei County, Taichung County, Tainan County and Kaohsiung County respectively.
Under such circumstances, if one wanted to talk about the entire area including both city and county, one could call them Greater Taipei, Greater Taichung, Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung.
Then, on Dec. 25, 2010, Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung cities were expanded by combining them with the counties of the same names, while Taipei County was upgraded to the status of a special municipality and is now called New Taipei City in English. Taichung and Tainan were upgraded at the same time as being enlarged, thus increasing the number of special municipalities from two to five.
When that happened, the Taipei Times editors apparently thought it would be a good idea to distinguish between the original Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung cites and their newly expanded forms by calling the latter Greater Taichung, Greater Tainan and Greater Kaohsiung respectively.
This editorial decision might have been a useful clarification at the time, but four years have passed since then and surely the message must have got through to Taipei Times readers by now.
Apart from that, it frankly gets a bit tedious to keep reading the word “Greater” whenever these places are mentioned.
In view of the fact that the official titles of these municipalities are Taichung City, Tainan City and Kaohsiung City, and that no “lesser” versions of these cities exist, might I respectfully suggest that the Taipei Times take the arrival of a new year, and of Taoyuan City as a new municipality, as an opportunity to start calling these cities by their official names, or just Taichung, Tainan and Kaohsiung for short.
One might still use the term “Greater Taipei” when talking about Taipei City, New Taipei City and perhaps even Keelung as one single area.
Jacob Zhu
Taipei
(Chief copy editor’s note: The Taipei Times did indeed decide to use “Greater Taichung,” etc. to reflect the expanded scope of the new special municipalities in 2010. We continue to use these names, at least on first reference, for the sake of clarity, as well as to aid the understanding of less frequent readers, who might for example not otherwise realize that “Tainan” refers to both the former city and its former county. However, we might admittedly have tested the patience of our regular readers with our over-enthusiastic employment of the “Greater,” even when there was no possibility of misunderstanding, and will add Mr Zhu’s suggestion to our new year’s resolutions.)
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