Oh that's so cheeky!

The government has redrawn the map of the regions of France, reducing the number of regions to 13. One change affects us directly. Before we were Aquitaine, and we comprised five departments: the Gironde, the Dordogne, the Lot et Garonne, the Landes and the Pyrenees-Atlantiques.

Now we have been merged with the Limousin and with Poitou-Charente.

Aquitaine had a historical logic to its name, going back to the Roman Aquitania.
But to name regions which are composed of smaller entities there are two possibilities.
The first is to hyphenate abbreviations of the name - as in Poitou-Charentes.
The second is to use initials, as in PACA (Provence-Alpes-Cote-d'Azur).

Readers of our regional newspaper were invited to suggest names for our new, larger region.

I thought Aquipoichamousin sounded good for the South-West of France.

The cheekiest suggestion was APOIL - Aquitaine-Poitou-Limousin. "A poil" means starkers.

Another cheeky one was CLAP - Charente-Limousin-Aquitaine-Poitou.

I have always thought that "je vis dans la PACA" sounds a bit grim, but "je vis dans la CLAP" sounds dreadful.

Good sense has prevailed, and the new region is to be called - Aquitaine. After all, in the past Aquitaine did extend as far as Poitiers, apparently.

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