My yard borders on a flowing body of water that’s named a creek, but it’s bigger than many that are named rivers. The name goes back a couple hundred years, and no one is bothered by it. But sometimes the definition of a geographical feature is important. The 1995 movie The Englishman who Went up a Hill but Came Down a Mountain had to do with a strict definition of what a “mountain” is, which enraged the residents of a Welsh village because they were proud of their mountain. The moral of the story is that strict definitions can make a mountain out of a molehill, so to speak. Throw in the different definitions of “mountain” in different parts of the world, and it becomes clear that no one definition will do. Many agencies have definitions that are pretty broad and have the word “or” several times.
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This distinction can be silly, or it can have serious political implications, such as the difference between a lake and a sea. Both are bodies of water surrounded by land, but in the case of the Caspian Sea, the distinction makes a big difference in how the sea’s jurisdiction is divided between the five countries that surround it. Read about the difficulties of these definitions and the controversies surrounding them at Today I Found Out.
Source: neatorama