Trump wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America
By 
Yes I know we’re not supposed to pay attention to any of this stuff because it’s just all a big distraction. Sue me if I post too long:
Donald Trump wants to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” he revealed in a bonkers news conference Tuesday.
“We’re going to be changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, which has a beautiful ring that covers a lot of territory,” he said. “The Gulf of America, what a beautiful name.”
The Gulf of Mexico, as it was named as far back as the 16th century by Spaniards, is a semi-enclosed sea in the southeastern corner of North America. Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida all have coastline with the body of water.
I like that last graph, which assumes the average reader of this piece is as dumb as Donald Trump, or the median Trump voter.
Something I’ve never actually thought about, because I spent most of my life living in a significantly less insane nation, is what sort of legal status, if any, a name like the Gulf of Mexico has. I guess I assume a name like that, given that it’s not a sovereign territory that different sovereigns might give different names as they squabble over it, is purely a matter of social convention, and there’s nothing to stop Real American geographers, Google maps etc, immediately referring to it as the Gulf of America going forward, beyond the mind-bending stupidity of all this, which needless to say is no longer any sort of barrier to anything at all happening in this crazy mixed up world.
ETA: This of course turns out to be wrong:
A dispute exists over the international name for the body of water which is bordered by Japan, Korea (North and South) and Russia. In 1992, objections to the name Sea of Japan were first raised by North Korea and South Korea at the Sixth United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names. The Japanese government supports the exclusive use of the name “Sea of Japan” (Japanese: 日本海), while South Korea supports the alternative name “East Sea” (Korean: 동해; Hanja: 東海), and North Korea supports the name “Korean East Sea” (조선동해; 朝鮮東海). Currently, most international maps and documents use either the name Sea of Japan (or equivalent translation) by itself, or include both the name Sea of Japan and East Sea, often with East Sea listed in parentheses or otherwise marked as a secondary name. The International Hydrographic Organization, the governing body for the naming of bodies of water around the world, in 2012 decided it was still unable to revise the 1953 version of its publication S-23 – Limits of Oceans and Seas, which includes only the single name “Sea of Japan”, to include “East Sea” together with “Sea of Japan”.
Thanks to several of our learned commenters for pointing this out.
More Wikipedia:
Several hypotheses seek to explain the etymology of the name Mexico (México in modern Spanish) which dates, at least, back to 14th century Mesoamerica. Among these are expressions in the Nahuatl language such as, “Place in the middle of the century plant“ (Mexitli) and “Place in the Navel of the Moon” (Mēxihco) along with the currently used shortened form in Spanish, “belly button of the moon” (“el ombligo de la luna”), used in both 21st century speech and literature. Presently, there is still no consensus among experts.[1]
As far back as 1590, the Theatrum Orbis Terrarum showed that the northern part of the New World was known as “America Mexicana” (Mexican America), as Mexico City was the seat for the New Spain viceroyalty. New Spain was not the old name for Mexico, but was in actuality the name of all Spanish colonial possessions in North America, the Caribbean, and The Philippines; since New Spain was not actually a state or a contiguous piece of land, in modern times, “Mexico” would have been a jurisdiction under the command of the authorities in modern Mexico City. Under the Spaniards, Mexico was both the name of the capital and its sphere of influence, most of which exists as Greater Mexico City and the State of Mexico. Some parts of Puebla, Morelos and Hidalgo were also part of Spanish-era Mexico.
In 1821, the continental part of New Spain seceded from Spain during the Trienio Liberal, which was followed by the birth of the short-lived First Mexican Empire. This was the first recorded use of “Mexico” as a country title.
It’s interesting to me at least that this is so often the situation in etymology: Nobody knows why anything is called anything.
The impious maintain that nonsense is normal in the Library and that the reasonable (and even humble and
pure coherence) is an almost miraculous exception. They speak (I know) of the “feverish Library whose chance volumes are constantly in danger of changing into others and affirm, negate and confuse everything like a delirious divinity.”
These words, which not only denounce the disorder but exemplify it as well, notoriously prove their authors’ abominable taste and desperate ignorance. In truth, the Library includes all verbal structures, all variations permitted by the twenty-five orthographical symbols, but not a single example of absolute nonsense. It is useless to observe that the best volume of the many hexagons under my administration is entitled The Combed Thunderclap and another The Plaster Cramp and another Axaxaxas mlö. These phrases, at first glance incoherent, can no doubt be justified in a cryptographical or allegorical manner; such a justification is verbal and, ex hypothesi, already figures in the Library. I cannot combine some characters
dhcmrlchtdj
which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning.
No one can articulate a syllable which is not filled with tenderness and fear, which is not, in one of these languages, the powerful name of a god. To speak is to fall into tautology. This wordy and useless epistle already exists in one of the thirty volumes of the five shelves of one of the innumerable hexagons — and its refutation as well. (An n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?)
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel”
. . . It’s funny until somebody gets hurt:
President-elect Donald J. Trump said Tuesday that he would not rule out the use of military or economic coercion to force Panama to give up control of the canal America built more than a century ago and to force Denmark to sell Greenland to the United States.
In a rambling, hourlong news conference, Mr. Trump also reiterated his threat that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if the hostages being held by Hamas are not released by Inauguration Day, repeating the threat four times.