What's in a Name?
Is Donald Trump's insistence on changing the name of a body of water really so strange?
2025 Is off to apparently a slow news month, or so one might think given the amount of press dedicated to how Google is responding to Trump’s demands that the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ as we’ve known it our whole lives be renamed ‘Gulf of America.’ Okay, to be fair plenty of digital ink has been spilled on far greater issues of importance, but for some reason more left-leaning publications have taken great offense to this demand and just won’t let it rest.
This is curious because the portion of the population who are up in arms over this, are the same part of the population who are otherwise obsessed with re-naming everything from schools to mountains. When Mt. McKinley was renamed Mt. Denali in 2015 most of us didn’t really care, or even notice. If you lived in Alaska the news was probably of greater importance, but the people in the Lower-48 who couldn’t stop talking about it were of course the people who today have a death grip on their pearls over this new name change.
Why you might ask? Sure, renaming the body of water certainly is some low hanging victory-lap fruit for the Trump faithful; and if we’re truly honest with ourselves almost no one is going to notice the difference unless they want to. We call them the Gulf States, in all the time I spent in Galveston people simply called it “swimming in the Gulf,” and in school our maps still said Union of Soviet Socialist Republics on it (though I did have to explain to my kid what CCCP was in a picture). Our Chief Executive is so petty that to insult Mexico we’re renaming the body of water they equally don’t own. And? I’ll be honest, if that’s all this was about I wouldn’t even bother to write this column.
What the outrage really is about, is that Google went along with it. In truth the #Resist crowd probably hasn’t said the full name of the body of water in ages themselves, and in all honesty would probably have campaigned to change it from it’s settler name of “Mexico” themselves if bodies of water had previously been on the chopping block for renaming things to make up for racism. This is about fighting every little petty thing Trump does, even if the argument being made makes little sense. Which is probably the real reason Trump did so in the first place.
To begin with, the name change actually makes more sense from a logical standpoint, especially when you realize we’re renaming it ‘Gulf of America’ and not ‘Gulf of United States.’ The gulf sits entirely inside the continent of North America (or between it and Central America if you insist). The ‘Americas’ refer to the entirety of land in this hemisphere, and thus, naming the (largest) body of water at it’s core to ‘America’ seems only logical. Was this Trump’s intention? No. Does it matter? Also no.
Arguments have been made that perhaps the US cannot legally rename it because under international maritime law our waters only extend 20 nautical miles into it, ignoring that it is the same for both Mexico and Cuba (often cited as reasons it can’t be renamed - ignoring dozens of other countries with territorial waters in the Gulf). This is one of those arguments that my eight year old would make; but international law has nothing to do with what we call a body of water. They make the point that changing the name would require nautical charts to be revised - something the USA doesn’t have unilateral power to decide and enforce. Never mind that Mt. McKinley appears on all international aviation charts, which again the USA doesn’t have unilateral power to decide and enforce - but that didn’t stop renaming it. It was a fake argument then, and this is a fake argument now.
Yet again this is less about the actual Gulf and more about Google, both do start with G so I understand any confusion. How dare Google display ‘Gulf of America’ to users in side the United States of America! The rest of the world still technically see’s ‘Gulf of Mexico’ and if you VPN out of America you still see the OG name we grew up with. Of course these were the very people who adopted and enforced changing the name of ‘Kiev’ to ‘Kyiv’ because Ukrainians transliterated the Cyrillic differently than the hated Russians. It didn’t matter that we grew up knowing the city by the name ‘Kiev’ at all, it needed to be changed because allowing the name in English to be transliterated with the Russified spelling somehow meant you supported the Russians taking over the world.
It’s a weak argument to make because virtually all English accounts of ‘Kharkiv’ are done in their Germanized version of ‘Karkov,’ ignoring the Russian ‘Kharkov’ as well. This makes linguistic sense since in English we can drop the silent-H. Our language draws these sounds from German, which is why we translate those words into that format for spelling. In fact this is the real reason we’ve always spelled it ‘Kiev,’ which is how the Germans spelled it too, but also we pronounce it German1 accordingly: “Key-Ehv” while both Russians and Ukrainians pronounce it “KEE-vh.” If we were going to spell it to match them, it really should just be “Kyv!” After all inserting a long and short of the same sound makes no literary sense in English. This is because the ‘I believe in Science’ crowd ignores linguistic rules and the most basic tenant of language: it is nothing more than the common designation of things that allow us to communicate with one another. Our maps are all in English, and arguably ‘Kiev’ is what we know and call the city. When you start calling things by names not everyone agrees on, it creates confusion.
After all, none of these fools rises to anger when we call it ‘Tokyo’ and not ‘Edo,’ or even ‘Japan’ over ‘Nippon.’ These are pure examples of translation, but what about other Latin translations? No frustration what so ever that ‘Deutschland’ shows up in Google Maps as ‘Germany.’ Likewise none of them argues in favor of Russifying ‘Moscow’ to ‘Moskva.’ Their argument is of course that calling it something not everyone calls it leads to confusion, but if we’re being fair none of us English speakers calls it ‘Gulfo de Mexico.’
That’s all because words are violence, and words have special hidden meanings to the group of people upset about Trump re-designating the Gulf of Mexico. Authoritarians are obsessed with names and their meanings: which is why most people in Ho Chi Minh City still call it Saigon. The real fly in their ointment comes from having the United States be added to Google’s ‘Special Rules’ list of countries: countries who have special requirements to display names and other designations to match political and [politically motivated] legal requirements. It’s a list you end up on when you make rules that require everyone to conform to things you re-designate which differ from the norm: the very thing the people most upset about this are obsessed with doing themselves. The irony.
Yes, those opposed would make the point we’re going with the German convention because of WWII but the city appears on maps going back more than just the last 85 years. We certainly didn’t adopt 1/4 of our language starting in the 1940’s either.