More wapiti!

This article reminded me that American English has an unfortunate tendency to take boring British words and apply them exclusively to things that already have good names. For example, we took "corn" -- which to the British just means grain -- and apply it specifically to the plant otherwise known as maize. In the instance that the article parenthetically refers to, we Americans had to come up with the word "moose" (which, granted, is a pretty good word) because we had given the British word "elk" to a kind of large deer that would otherwise be known as "wapiti." How could anyone think it's a good idea to get rid of a word like "wapiti"?