Should we call it Lake America or Lake Ontario? – Latest News
What’s in a identify? These days fairly a lot, it appears. Since President Trump issued his Executive Order declaring that the physique of water conventionally generally known as Lake Ontario would henceforth be named “Lake America,” we’ve seen surprisingly impassioned demonstrations of each assist and opposition — and never simply from Canadians.
These responses had been attention-grabbing on two counts. First, as a result of some of the identical people who had mocked or decried the renaming of previous locations on the idea of up to date ideologies had been now glad to comply with go well with for his or her own political causes. And additionally, as a result of those that had previously nodded alongside as monuments fell to fashionable political actions had been now shocked and appalled to appreciate somebody much less congenial would possibly do the identical.
A Canadian flag flies alongside the waterfront of Lake Ontario/America in Toronto. AFP by way of Getty Images
Granted, names have all the time had a sure intrinsic significance. Arkansas, for instance, has an official state law specifying that its identify should be pronounced “Arkansaw” moderately than “Ar-Kansas” — handed by General Assembly in 1881. (Growing up, there have been rumors concerning the merciless and weird penalties utilized to violators.) And that is with out stepping into the countless international disputes over the proper utility of “Macedonia” or the “British Isles.”
But within the previous few years the obsession with names and altering them has escalated. For some time now, up to date progressives working on Red Guard lite-mode have gladly sacrificed conventional names — to not say statues and establishments — to their ideological passions.
Canadians themselves can’t precisely stand on precept right here: Toronto’s central Dundas Square was lately renamed to “Sankofa Square,” for causes no one fairly appears to know. Across the town, these in search of Woodsy Park will as an alternative discover Ethennonnhawahstihnen’ Park. If you held a gun to the heads of close by residents and demanded they accurately pronounce this, you’ll virtually definitely finish up with a lot of our bodies.
Ethennonnhawahstihnen’ Park, previously named Woodsy Park, is pictured on Friday, July 19, 2024, in Toronto. Ethennonnhawahstihnen’ means “where they had a good, beautiful life” in Wendat. City of Toronto
President Trump against this has stored issues easy with Lake America, simply as he did final 12 months with the Gulf of America (previously “of Mexico”). One envisions a future during which all natural options ultimately get renamed some variant of “America” — just like the weird scene in “Being John Malkovich” during which all language has been diminished to varied inflections of the phrase “Malkovich.”
So, what precisely is the issue right here? In his basic research, “Names on the Land,” George R. Stewart noticed how Americans each inherited place names from a selection of sources and, “adding more names, they gave to their children with every generation the heritage richer than before.” And observe that Lake Ontario, too, was half of that heritage, being so designated within the Treaty of Canandaigua, signed on behalf of George Washington and “Six Nations of Indians” in 1794 — no Canadians concerned.
A welcome signal is pictured in Intercourse, Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Universal Images Group by way of Getty Images
Nor is that heritage altogether grand and respectable. Rural America is replete with such gleefully vulgar-sounding names as Climax, Ga.; Beaverlick, Ky.; and Intercourse, Pa. And whereas I would wince if I needed to see them each time I drove home, I wouldn’t change them. Similarly, I as soon as spent the higher half of an hour laughing as I drove previous the Saskatchewan metropolis Regina (pronounced with a long “i”).
We crave the actual, the actual, the native, the colourful. Lincoln’s mystic chords of reminiscence resound in our founding paperwork but in addition within the cadences of precise locations like Frostproof, Fla., or Last Chance, Iowa — heck, even Hell, Mich. Such place-names are a concrete illustration of our historical past, in all its variegated, multihued strangeness. What the music critic Greil Marcus referred to as the “old, weird America” could be very a lot alive in these eponyms.
President Donald J. Trump indicators an govt order to rename Lake Ontario as Lake America within the Oval Office of the White House on Thursday, August 27, 2026, in Washington, D.C. MediaPunch / BACKGRID
The present occupant of the White House could also be an particularly egoistic fellow, however this egoism is in any other case common to our time — what the essayist GK Chesterton known as the “small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.” What he meant was that it’s all too straightforward for us now alive to ignore those that got here earlier than and bequeathed a lot to us.
Let us then be magnanimous enough to respect the names handed down to us by the useless — of rivers, lakes, mountains, parks, statues, universities. For these nonetheless impelled to embark on additional naming sprees, one hopes the promised age of space exploration and colonization will present a appropriate outlet for his or her ambitions.
David Polansky is an American author residing in Toronto and the creator of the Strange Frequencies Substack @polanskydj.
