MapQuest continues to ride a wave of positive publicity after their refusal to rename Lake Ontario. They’ve posted billboards in Chicago and Toronto with directions to the Lake, their CEO made a well-publicized visit to the lake itself, they have we’re-not-changing-the-name merch at their store. Call it principled or opportunistic—it can be both, honestly—but either way they’re making the most of it.
They’ve also posted their roadmap of upcoming features.
John Gruber has a problem with Google and Apple showing “Lake Ontario (Lake America)” to users not in the U.S. and Canada: he compares it to China’s insistence on labelling Taiwan as a province of China, or enlarging the Daioyu Islands, which is not something either platform does outside of China. But he does not think that Google or Apple could have ignored Trump’s name changes inside the U.S.:
What a lot of people want is for Google and Apple to just ignore the U.S. government’s official new names. […] But I suspect, quite strongly, that the people who profess to be the most angry at Apple and Google for going along with this change are the same people who would argue most strongly that Goliath tech companies and mega-billionaires wield too much anti-democratic power and influence.
It’s not coherent to argue that Google and Apple should decide which names to put on their maps only when you want them to ignore the names from the official government database. Neither Google nor Apple are going to sell their maps apps, but it’s not outlandish to think that in some alternative universe, one or more of the leading maps app might be owned by, say, Elon Musk or Larry Ellison. Would the people who want Apple and Google to ignore the official names from the GNIS support the same stance if the two leading maps apps were owned by SpaceX and Oracle instead? Obviously they would not.
What we want is a system where geographic names are determined democratically, by voting. And that is the system we in fact have. Trump won. The Department of the Interior has the power to change these names. If you’re angry that their official names in the United States are now Lake America and Gulf of America, stay angry that Trump won the 2024 election. Stay angry that our president continues to debase his office and embarrass our nation. Directing your anger at Google and Apple for reflecting that change is shooting the messengers.
But this is why I find it embarrassing that both Google and Apple are foisting these absurd names on the rest of the world, even if only between parentheses. These names are nonsense, and they are Americans’ nonsense to deal with. […] Spreading the nonsense to the world only makes it more embarrassing.
Previously: Lake Ontario.
Here we go again.
Last week the U.S. president did to Lake Ontario what he did to the Gulf of Mexico a year and a half ago: rename it after America. This was part of an ongoing hissy fit against a country—my country—for walking away from trade talks due to demands from the U.S. side that were literally unacceptable.
It was meant to bait us, and in general Canadians have not taken it well (responses ranging from can you believe this doofus to it’s fucking go time). Doug Ford put up a big sign. Blue Rodeo fans screamed the lake’s name at a concert. Our prime minister, Mark Carney, refused to take the bait, issuing the following statement via social media channels:
The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”.
The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America.
We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.
Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario—then, now and always.
That’s dry enough that my country’s entire vermouth supply spontaneously combusted. (And yes, we have a leader who can use the word “hydronym” in a social media post.)
Continue reading “Lake Ontario”