Scientists have found racism floating around, literally, in upstate New York.

Three place names there bear the N-word in their titles: N----- Lake, N----- River and N----- Road.

The areas never caused public outrage because few people ever noticed the slur, but recently state environmental scientists did.

"It was a shock to us. The term is very offensive," Scott Stoner, a research scientist for the state Department of Environmental Conservation, told the Wall Street Journal. "These are not regulations that get looked at often, but somebody discovered it."

Last week the state moved to quietly remove the n-word from its regulations, but its local roads and water bodies cannot be renamed. The new lake name instead? “Unknown Lake.”

The federal government tried to eliminate all N-word references from its maps in the early 1960s, but it looks like some references slipped through the cracks.

Query: Do you know of any other offensively named places that still exist?

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