The last word

On Monday, the story goes, a group of Costa Mesa residents are going

to suggest to the City Council that the name of the city be changed.

Costa Mesa-by-the-sea seems to be floating near the top of the list

because, after all, Costa Mesa floats near by the Pacific Ocean, we

guess. Though we’ve yet to cover any surfing contests in Costa Mesa.

So, yeah, back to the name game.

There’s the Costa part of the city’s name, which translates nicely

into “coast” in English. Add in Mesa and you have the appealing-sounding

city name of Coastal Bluff (from the Spanish for coastal table, a more

direct translation).

And oh yeah, forget about the fact that Costa Mesa is Spanish and

by-the-sea is English. Still, once such a movement gets rolling, it’s --

well, it’s not that hard to stop, but it will roll gently along for a

while, we suppose.

So our suggestion in keeping with the spirit of redundancy and

language mixing: Costa by the Coast.