What's in a name?

The left just discovered Wikipedia and declared it a diplomatic crisis.

Or, as seems more likely, their thought leaders at Raw Story or Yahoo flooded their news feed with the latest hivemind chant.





Until this week, most of the people now clutching their pearls over “erasure of Wendat identity” could not have told you whether Ontario was named for the lake or the other way around.

They treated the word the same way they treat Massachusetts, Connecticut, Illinois, and Michigan: as background noise on a weather map.

Then the Great Satan (Trump) Sharpied a federal database that Canada, New York, Google Maps, and every sailor on the lake will ignore, and suddenly the name that sat unmolested for four centuries became sacred.

The same voices that spent a decade tearing down statues, renaming schools, and lecturing everyone about “decolonizing” the landscape have now decided that this particular word is inviolable—provided the person touching it is Trump.

The poutrage is not about history. It is about discovering a fact they themselves did not know yesterday and immediately converting it into a morality play.

Lake Ontario will still be Lake Ontario tomorrow.

The only thing that changed is that a lot of people who never cared about the etymology now pretend they always did.

That is not an international incident.

That was Thursday in the life of an NPC.

IIRC, in 2015 the Great Saint Obama (praise him!) did the exact opposite move and was applauded for it by the the usual suspects.




Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, with the Messiah Obama’s explicit endorsement, used the same federal naming authority to strip the official name Mount McKinley (in federal use since 1917) and restore the Koyukon Athabascan name Denali.


The undefiled Holy Temple (the pre-ballroom White House) billed it as "honoring Alaska Native heritage" and reversing “cultural imperialism.”


Ohio politicians howled; the Democrat-infested media treated it as moral progress.


So the rule, apparently, is this:

• Change an established official name to a Native one = sacred restoration, long overdue, “the high one.”
• Change an established official name away from a Native one (or even just relabel it on U.S. government maps) = unspeakable erasure, international incident, attack on identity.

The mountain never moved. The lake never moved. Only the permitted direction of the Sharpie changed.


Same Interior Department mechanism. Same Board on Geographic Names. Same “federal usage only” limitation. Different president, therefore different sacrament.


N.B.; lefties still call it "Denali".


That’s the entire doctrine.


Here endeth the lesson.

Diogenes said:

IIRC, in 2015 the Great Saint Obama (praise him!) did the exact opposite move and was applauded for it by the the usual suspects.

PRAISE HIM AND ALL HIS DEEDS FOREVERMORE, YE FAITHFUL!​

Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, with the Messiah Obama’s explicit endorsement, used the same federal naming authority to strip the official name Mount McKinley (in federal use since 1917) and restore the Koyukon Athabascan name Denali.


The undefiled Holy Temple (the pre-ballroom White House) billed it as "honoring Alaska Native heritage" and reversing “cultural imperialism.”


Ohio politicians howled; the Democrat-infested media treated it as moral progress.


So the rule, apparently, is this:

• Change an established official name to a Native one = sacred restoration, long overdue, “the high one.”
• Change an established official name away from a Native one (or even just relabel it on U.S. government maps) = unspeakable erasure, international incident, attack on identity.

The mountain never moved. The lake never moved. Only the permitted direction of the Sharpie changed.


Same Interior Department mechanism. Same Board on Geographic Names. Same “federal usage only” limitation. Different president, therefore different sacrament.


N.B.; lefties still call it "Denali".


That’s the entire doctrine.


Here endeth the lesson.

Click to expand...

President Obama did not do this, did he? Is Mt. Denali in a federally controlled land?

Not the same interior Department mechanism, Trump did it with an executive order, a power he does not have.

Jarod said:

President Obama did not do this, did he? Is Mt. Denali in a federally controlled land? Not the same interior Department mechanism, Trump did it with an executive order, a power he does not have.

Click to expand...

Brad’s three points in post 7087118 are easy to answer from the public record.


1. “President Obama did not do this, did he?”


He did. On 30 August 2015 Interior Secretary Sally Jewell issued Secretarial Order 3337 changing the official federal name of the mountain from Mount McKinley to Denali. The White House and DOI press releases both stated that President Obama endorsed the decision. The mountain had carried the McKinley name in federal use since 1917; Alaska had petitioned for Denali since 1975.


2. “Is Mt. Denali in a federally controlled land?”


Yes. The peak sits entirely inside Denali National Park and Preserve, a unit of the National Park System. That is not in dispute.


3. “Not the same Interior Department mechanism. Trump did it with an executive order, a power he does not have.”


Same statute, different instrument.


Both actions rest on 43 U.S.C. §§ 364–364f (the 1947 law that created the Board on Geographic Names and gave the Secretary of the Interior conjoint authority with the Board). Jewell used a Secretarial Order because the Board had sat on Alaska’s 1975 petition for decades. Trump’s 27 August 2026 executive order directs the current Secretary, “in coordination with the Board on Geographic Names and consistent with 43 U.S.C. 364 through 364f,” to update the Geographic Names Information System within 30 days. That is the same federal-usage database and the same statutory hook. An EO telling a cabinet secretary to exercise an authority Congress already gave that secretary is ordinary executive practice; it is how the Gulf of America change was done in 2025 as well.


Neither action binds Canada, New York, Google, or sailors. Both only control what U.S. agencies put on their own maps, contracts, and documents. Diogenes already said that in the OP.

The Great Satan Sharpie’d a federal database.


Canada, New York, Google Maps, and every chart used by actual mariners will keep calling it Lake Ontario.


The name itself is Wendat—Ontari’io, “beautiful/great lake” or “lake of shining waters”, and it was already on European maps in the 1600s, long before either country existed.


Grand Chief Pierre Picard of the Wendat Nation in Quebec called it erasure. I'm pretty sure the Wendat didn't respect/retain the place names of any tribes they conquered.


Nobody in that world ran a heritage-name commission.


The word that survived—Ontarí’io / ontari:io—is Iroquoian. Sources split it between Wendat/Wyandot and closely related Haudenosaunee forms; same language family, same meaning cluster (“great/beautiful lake,” “shining waters”).


Ancestral Wendat communities sat on the north shore of that lake from roughly the 1300s into the 1500s before they concentrated farther north in historic Wendake. They were not the first people there.


East of them were the St. Lawrence Iroquoians, who vanish from the valley by about 1580. Archaeology and Wendat tradition both say a lot of them were folded into Wendat towns as allies or refugees; others went into Haudenosaunee or Algonquian groups. West were the Attawandaron (Neutrals).


Before the Iroquoian village societies you have earlier Woodland and Algonquian use of the same shoreline. None of those earlier names for the lake made it onto a French map.


Then the Wendat Confederacy itself was smashed by the Haudenosaunee in 1648–50.


Survivors were adopted into Iroquois villages, fled to Quebec, or became the later Wyandot. The north shore was briefly Seneca country, then Mississauga/Anishinaabe country.


The French tried Lac St. Louis and Lac Frontenac. “Ontario” is simply the Iroquoian label that stuck with the mapmakers.


So the pattern is the ordinary one: the people who were there when the Europeans started writing things down got their word into the record.


They did not preserve the hydronyms of whoever they had displaced or absorbed a century or three earlier.


The Haudenosaunee did not preserve Wendat political geography after they destroyed the confederacy. The Mississauga did not treat the brief Seneca occupation as sacred.


Treating this particular Iroquoian name as an eternal aboriginal title that Trump just “erased” skips every prior layer and every war among the nations who actually lived on the lake.


The name is old. The sudden piety about it is not.


Everyone else "discovered" the etymology this week and immediately treated it like a newly unearthed eternal truth.

The fact lefties are triggered about this after they spent the last decade plus renaming sports teams, public schools and universities, streets and highways, food etc. is, I suspect why Trump (the Great Satan) renames things. For the LULZ.

Here’s a very incomplete list of things that snowflakes renamed:

• Washington Redskins = Commanders
• Cleveland Indians = Guardians
• Columbus Day = Indigenous Peoples’ Day
• Robert E. Lee High School = John Lewis High
• Jefferson Davis Highway = Richmond Highway
• Mount McKinley = Denali
• Fort Bragg = Fort Liberty
• Fort Hood = Fort Cavazos
• Boy Scouts of America = Scouting America
• Aunt Jemima = Pearl Milling Company
• Uncle Ben’s Rice = Ben’s Original
• Eskimo Pie ice cream bars = Edy’s Pie
• Land O’Lakes: removed the Indian, but kept the land (just like Democrat Andrew Jackson did)
• Illegal alien = undocumented worker
• Hispanic = Latinx
• Mother = birthing person
• Anchor baby = child of noncitizens
• Negro, African-American, colored, black = Black
• Breastfeeding = chest feeding
• Inmate / prisoner / convict / felon = justice-involved person (unless its the Great Satan)
• Ex-con / ex-felon = returning citizen
• Fat = plus-sized
• Master bedroom = primary bedroom
• Manhole = utility hole (this one is particularly popular on the left for . . . reasons.)





And so on and so on. . .