Yo Boomers, Gen Xers, and Millennials, check it: “Shade” means “disrespect” in Gen Z slang, according to MassLive.com’s article about a Brookline, Massachusetts teenager whose prank Google Maps submission ended up becoming a real street name. Pretty ratchet, right?!?

Ughhh man. Hasn’t “shade” been around for like 10, maybe 15 years by now? Jesus Christ, lol. What makes it even more ridiculous is that the “clarification” distracts from the overall point of the article, which is pretty funny and interesting in and of itself, a 21st century version of the “Paper Town” of Agloe, New York. Shortest version possible: Back when commercially-produced paper maps were the only way to get driving directions, plagiarism was rampant. If you owned a printing press why bother with putting in all the work to create and draw your own maps when you could just buy one from a bigger company and copy their drawings? It got to the point where mapping drafters selling their work to Esso in the 1920s started putting fake towns on their maps in order to catch scammers, one of them being “Agloe,” placed at the intersection of two country roads in Delaware County.

Then in the 1930s Rand McNally printed a map with Agloe on it and Esso thought they caught them stealing their work, buuuuut turned out that some family had opened up “Agloe Lodge Farms” at the intersection, thus making the paper town real. The name persisted for decades – even though nobody actually lived there after the lodge closed – into the 1990s when Rand McNally removed it.

Nearly a century later in 2020, a then-14-year old Boston-area kid named Brandon Libby was bored out of his mind due to COVID and decided idly to submit to Google Maps that a driveway going into a nursing home was named “Maranville Street” after 1920s Red Sox Hall of Famer Rabbit Maranville.

Libby told his family about it and it occasionally came up as a family joke but he didn’t think much more of it until 2022 when he was riding an MBTA bus and heard “Independence Drive at Maranville Street” on the automated PA announcing the upcoming stops. Turned out the local public transit authority had looked at Google Maps and used it for the name. Libby said he’s taking it further, nagging the Boston 311 system to put up a street sign marking Maranville Street.

He told MassLive that 311 said the request is currently in the “second stage of review.”