I keep lists. While I do not believe there is a name for someone who keeps lists as there is for one who collects stamps — a philatelist, or a keeper of postcards, known as a deltiologist — I am simply a keeper of lists. One list is of names that are actually what the name says the object or geographic location is. For example, in the South Island of New Zealand, southeast of Queenstown, there is a range of mountains called the Remarkables. They are pristine, beautiful and truly remarkable. Another example is a swamp in northern North Carolina and Virginia called the Great Dismal Swamp, the largest remnant of a swamp habitat that once covered more than a million acres. A final example is the Trail of Tears. It was the route that more than 16,000 Cherokee Indians took from their homelands in the southern United States to Oklahoma. It is estimated that more than a third of those Cherokee people died on the Trail of Tears. Another list I keep is names that do not signify what the name indicates, such as the Big Ten Conference in collegiate sports, which has 14 teams, or the Fox News Network, whose motto is “fair and balanced.”
Iowa is currently undertaking a new program to turn its Medicaid program from a state-government-managed program of medical help for poor and disabled populations to a for-profit, private managed-care approach to administer the medical needs for these populations. The title of this program is the Iowa High Quality Health Care Initiative. I am holding judgment as to which list this program with the ambiguous name would more likely be appropriately added.