New England place name inflation

Right: this issue is very much a “this is how we do it around here.” And as New England can be quite confusing with its fauna of place-names (or rather, words in English that denote places, like town, village and hamlet) which overlap between “what people call one of those settlements around here” and “how OSM denotes a populated place of a certain size of population,” there WILL be misunderstandings and hence, the occasional need for “realignments” such as this.

In Oz-Down-Under, you can roll in certain ways that are unique to there, and New Englanders (in OSM) will be fine with it.

This is a topic where a unique combination of OSM tagging (syntax, and by extension, semantics), “local politics” (as in New England, or Australia…) and “what your ‘local’ English-speaking sense of place-names seems to dictate a place is called” (in OSM, perhaps based on local political colloquialisms, perhaps based on “well, we all know what that means in our local dialect of English” all overlap and can and do confuse. And “no,” those are not always the same things. Hence the fuzzy semantics and OSM tagging.

We do OK here, we get better, but certain reminders and dialog (such as in this thread) do help now and then.