Suppose you lived in California and read a headline in the Los Angeles Times outdoor section: Californian Offshore Fishing Improves. What would a Utah deer hunter think if the Salt Lake Tribune used Utahn Deer in their hunting report? An eastern outdoor editor is not likely to write about New Yorker trout fishing any more than the Los Angeles Times will use Californian fishing, or the Salt Lake Tribune will refer to Utahn deer.
Pick up any Alaska newspaper or almost any publication with a reference to Alaska’s outdoors, its wildlife, or its fish and you will read Alaskan this and Alaskan that. It is not an Alaskan trout anymore than it is a Californian trout. I wish the purveyors of printed material would stop misusing Alaskan. An Alaskan is a person. Alaskan is not a trout, a moose, a trip, or even an adventure.
Alaskan has been used incorrectly for so long by so many that it has nearly become acceptable. Pick up the Anchorage Daily News or Alaska magazine and you can hardly read a page where the error is not perpetuated. Writers write and editors continue to permit the error. You can even witness this abuse in the names of shops, stores, and other businesses.
This is one Alaskan who knows the difference. When I’m in the outdoors, I’ll seek Alaska caribou and Alaska moose. I’ll fly out in an Alaska floatplane, land on an Alaska lake, pitch my tent on Alaska soil, and watch an Alaska sun set and an Alaska moon rise. I’ll take photographs and write about my Alaska adventure. Some of the photographs and stories will be published in Alaska Outdoors. For certain, I’m not going to shoot an Alaskan moose or caribou. It won’t be an Alaskan sunset I watch and it won’t be an Alaskan moon rising over the Alaskan Range, and I won’t have an Alaskan adventure.
You can bet your poke we never considered calling our television or radio program Alaskan Outdoors Magazine.
