WHEN I go to the post office, I pass under a sign that says Capitol Hill Post Office and mail a letter that is postmarked Capital Hill. How can that be? Surely, one is correct and one is incorrect. Right? No, not necessarily.
Wikipedia spells it Capitol Hill. U.S. Geological Survey spells it Capital Hill. Google uses Capitol. Marianas Variety uses Capital. Booking.com uses Capitol. AccuWeather uses Capital. Photos in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands archives at the University of Hawaii are labeled either Capital Hill or Capitol Hill, proving that at least some people were confused even back then.
What in the wide world of place names is going on here? And how does it relate to quantum physics?
After the CIA left in July 1962, the Saipan Municipal Council renamed Army Hill as Capital Hill, appropriately considering the Trust Territory headquartered there. Somehow, someway, Capital got hijacked by Capitol. When? Why? By who exactly?
Was it because a mapmaker, who didn’t really know, misspelled it and that was copied which spread? Or did someone decide that Capital was the wrong way to spell it and it should be Capitol, perhaps because the first CNMI Legislature was located in Susupe in 1978 and the definition of capital is where the legislature is situated, thus, it was no longer properly a capital hill?
I remember asking the late Luis Crisostimo why he spelled his name that way when everyone on Saipan and Guam including his family was Crisostomo. He said he thought his way looked better. Is that what happened here?
At some point Public Lands sided with Capitol Hill. Then why is the postmark there Capital Hill? Because that was its designation when it opened in the 1960’s based on the official name legally adopted by the local government. Take Capitol Hill, Seattle, as an example. There is no capitol there, never was, only a hope that if he built it, they would come but the government never came and the name sticks. How many people change their name when they get old? It’s the same thing here. No need, too late. Capital Hill Rural Branch is the designation issued by the United States Post Office.
So how can both spellings be correct? We use quantum mechanics to prove it by drawing upon Schrodinger’s cat, a thought experiment where the cat can be both dead and alive at the same time. Only when the box is opened do we know the correct outcome. In the world we observe, the cat is either dead or alive expressed as a probability, a percentage that may or may not equal the actual outcome. In the quantum world, which is as real as the world we observe, the outcome is the probability of alive added to the probability of dead which always equals the outcome.
In Saipan’s quantum world, therefore, both Capital and Capitol are correct and no one has to worry about misspelling it, which is good because I can only think of a billion more important things.
In my opinion, that area should be spelled Capital Hill because that’s the name given by the first Saipan government plus it’s the location of the Legislature. However, I spell it Capitol Hill as my name also has “o” but not “a” and I think my way looks better.
BOB COLDEEN
Chalan Galaide, Saipan
