Otarre Pointe

    Earlier, I was raving about a local real estate development, centered (from my point of view) on a hiking trail. The hiking trail is variously described as Timmerman Trail, the 12,000 Year Park, or the completion of the Cayce Riverwalk. The development, built and owned by the local power company, is called (embarrassingly) Otarre Pointe.
    Now I know that the gratuitous silent E has had a grand tradition of making real estate developers and agents look stupid, ignorant, or both for many decades now. And I suppose I could live with it if there were an actual geographical feature called Otarre Point. Or, you know, particularly many French people around here.
    The tipoff on the name, however, came from a street sign in the development for a street to be built called Clovis Pointe. And indeed, it turns out that there is a Native American arrowhead or spear point called the Otarre (or Otarrie) point, which is indeed found in the Southeast. Now you're getting into new horizons of stupid. I guess they wanted to add the E to differentiate between the archaeological artifacts and the street/development names. I guess you could make the argument that calling it Otarre Pointe makes people ask what that is, and helps publicize the future park, which is after all supposed to be about archaeology and Native history.
    But! What it says first is that you can't spell and what it says second is, what point? I wish they just would have asked intelligent people. There's a reasonably large university in town with a very nice archaeology program. It makes me feel stupid just living near a place called Otarre Pointe which is supposed to host a major regional tourist attraction. They could not easily have done worse (well, there's Redskin Park) and they could have so easily done better. Heck, Twelve Millennia sounds classy, and can be abbreviated 2K. How hard is that?