The Name Game: Confusing the Elderly in Their Declining Years

Trump reverses Obama's change of Mt. McKinley to Denali, while concocting a new name for the Gulf of Mexico.

That is no country for old men.

W. B. Yeats, Sailing to Byzantium.

From the Associated Press:

Trump order seeks to change the name of North America’s tallest peak from Denali to Mount McKinley

By BECKY BOHRER

Updated 7:02 PM PST, January 20, 2025

JUNEAU, Alaska (AP) — President Donald Trump issued an executive order Monday calling for North America’s tallest peak — Denali in Alaska — to be renamed Mount McKinley, reviving an idea he’d floated years ago and drawing a rebuke from Alaska’s Republican senior senator.

The order came hours after Trump, who took office for a second time Monday, said he planned to “restore the name of a great president, William McKinley, to Mount McKinley, where it should be and where it belongs. President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent.”

According to the National Park Service, a prospector in 1896 dubbed the peak “Mount McKinley” for William McKinley, who was elected president that year. McKinley had never been to Alaska. The name was formally recognized by the U.S. government until it was changed in 2015 by the Obama administration to Denali

When I visited Alaska in 1988, the mountain was named Mount McKinley and the national park it is in had been called Denali National Park since 1980. The National Park had been called Mt. McKinley National Park since 1917, but in 1978 Jimmy Carter created a neighboring Denali National Monument. In 1980, the two units were merged with the junior one giving its name to the agglomeration of Denali National Park.

That seemed like a reasonable compromise to me at the time. With both names in effect, you could use whichever one came naturally to you with only moderate chance for confusion.

In contrast, complete name changes confuse everybody past about their sophomore year in collage, and provide fodder to the easily offended, encouraging their tendencies toward obnoxious verbal puritanism.

Hence, in 2015, Obama changed Mt. McKinley to Denali (not Mt. Denali, just Denali).

Hopefully, Trump is going back to that compromise of the 1980s: reversing Obama’s 10 year old name change of Mt. McKinley to Denali but also leaving Carter’s 45 year old Denali National Park.

In the same executive order Monday, Trump also called for changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.

Sorry, President Trump, but I’m way too old to start calling the Gulf of Mexico by a new name.

Here comes the paywall followed by 1800 more words.

Same with Calcutta disappearing into Kolkata, and don’t get me started on Madras turning into Chennai.

And don’t get me started on re-spelling Kiev as Kyiv. I’m too old for that.

While we are at it, what’s the deal with “Livorno,” Italy? If Leghorn, the closest port to Florence, was good enough for Looney Tunes and good enough for Percy Bysshe Shelley to drown while sailing from it, Leghorn is good enough for me.

Winston Churchill had sound views on the folly of calling places by new names that would have befuddled Queen Victoria:

“I always thought it was a most unfortunate and most tiresome thing when both Persia and Mesopotamia changed their names at about the same time to two names which were so much alike—Iran and Iraq. …

“I do not consider that names that have been familiar for generations in England should be altered to study the whims of foreigners living in those parts. Where the name has no particular significance the local custom should be followed. However, Constantinople should never be abandoned, though for stupid people Istanbul may be written in brackets after it.

Calling Constantinople “Byzantium,” however, was a little hard core even for Churchill.

As for Angora, long familiar with us through the Angora cats, I will resist to the utmost of my power its degradation to Ankara …

D “Bad luck…always pursues people who change the names of their cities. Fortune is rightly malignant to those who break with the traditions and customs of the past….Ankara is banned, unless in brackets afterwards. If we do not make a stand we shall in a few weeks be asked to call Leghorn ‘Livorno,’ and the B.B.C. will be pronouncing Paris ‘Paree.’ Foreign names were made for Englishmen, not Englishmen for foreign names.”

Same with venerable sports stadiums getting new names slapped on them like Slash ‘n’ Burn Memecoin Park, names which you just know will need luck to endure merely their contractual term. You’ll notice, in contrast, that Yankee Stadium, Dodger Stadium, Fenway Park, and Wrigley Field don’t change their names.

A couple of dozen years ago I took a long look into this question of name-changing.

Feature: Name game - 'Inuit' or 'Eskimo'?

By STEVE SAILER, UPI National Correspondent

June 20, 2002 / 2:21 PM

LOS ANGELES, June 20 (UPI) -- As you may have heard, the highly acclaimed new movie Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner, which is slowly rolling out nationally, is the first major film made by the Inuit people.

Feel free to admit, however, that you're a little vague on who exactly are the Inuit. The answer, fortunately, is simple. They are a segment of one of the most legendary of all ethnic groups, a people almost universally admired for their ability to survive the harshest climate on Earth. In short, the Inuit are Eskimos.

Just don't call them that.

The official handbook of the 3-year-old Canadian Territory of Nunavut says, "A word of advice, please don't call Inuit here "Eskimos." They've always called themselves Inuit, or 'the people' in Inuktitut, their native tongue."

The confusion over "Eskimo" vs. "Inuit" illustrates the paradoxes that accompany the many attempts these days to change the names of ethnic groups.

According to the American Heritage Dictionary, "Many Americans today either avoid this term (Eskimo) or feel uneasy using it." For example, a Web site of the University of Wisconsin School of Education advises teachers, "There are no 'Eskimo' people."

That would come as a surprise, however, to thousands of Yup'ik-speaking Eskimos in Western Alaska who much prefer to be called "Eskimo" instead of "Inuit."

Why? They aren't Inuit.

Steven A. Jacobson, a professor at the Alaska Native Language Center (of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks), told United Press International, "Yup'ik speakers say, 'We're Yup'ik Eskimos; our relatives in northern Alaska, Canada and Greenland are Inuit Eskimos; they aren't Yup'ik, and we aren't Inuit, but we're all Eskimos.' Yup'ik speakers prefer to be called 'Yup'iks' ... and -- in contrast to Inuit in Canada -- don't mind the word 'Eskimo,' but they do not like to be called 'Inuit.'"

"Eskimo" remains the only word that describes all the physically and culturally quite homogenous groups that extend from the Siberian side of the Bering Strait to Greenland. The American Heritage Dictionary sums up, "While use of these terms ('Inuit' and 'Yup'ik') is often preferable when speaking of the appropriate linguistic group, none of them can be used of the Eskimoan peoples as a whole; the only inclusive term remains Eskimo."

In the 1970s, activists in Canada's Far North announced that "Eskimo" was insulting. They claimed it was originally an Algonquin Indian word for "eaters of raw meat."

Many linguists dispute this, arguing that early European explorers actually got "Eskimo" from a Micmac Indian word having to do with snowshoes. And even if the Algonquin theory is correct, the traditional Eskimo diet did indeed include a lot of raw meat. It's an excellent way to get enough vitamin C to avoid scurvy in the Arctic, where fruits and vegetables were almost completely unavailable.

A prominent example of ethnic name-changing involves the preferred term for Americans of African descent: first "Negro," then "black," and most recently, "African-American."

This trend spread to other groups. "Orientals" became "Asians" (even though there are hundreds of millions of people native to Asia -- such as Armenians and Arabs -- who are not included in the grouping for "Asians").

The Gypsies are now to be called "Roma," and the reindeer-herding Lapps of Northern Scandinavia are the "Saami." Similarly, some now claim the Iroquois Indians should be called the "Haudenosaunee" and the Cherokee the "Tsalagi" (which, like so many tribal names, means "the true people").

Most of these name-changing groups, however, lack the public relations firepower of African-Americans. When Jesse Jackson announced that he wanted "African-American" used instead of "black," the world took notice.

When less-prominent ethnic groups try name changes, however, ignorance is at least as likely to ensue as enlightenment. Entire library shelves of books become obsolete.

Millions of people permanently lose the thread. Unlike academic specialists, they have other, more personally important things to think about than the changing names of distant ethnic groups. Thus, they never make the mental connection that the mysterious new Inuit their children are studying in school are actually those Eskimos that they liked reading about when they were the same age, or that these new-fangled Roma aren't Romans or Romanians, but are actually the Gypsies who play that wonderful violin music.

One of my common themes is that ignorance is a natural problem, so we shouldn’t go out of our way to worsen it by making language more confusing.

In attempts to create a new name unburdened by old prejudices, the name game can end up dissipating the goodwill built up toward the old one.

Much of what little the 6 billion non-Eskimos know about Eskimos is what they learned in grade school: By being brave, hardy and clever, Eskimos could survive in a world of ice and snow. That's not much, but it's not bad, either.

It's generally assumed among up-to-date English-speakers that an ethnic group should be called by whatever it calls itself, not what outsiders call it.

Yet, practically no one outside of the Anglosphere worries about this principle at all. For example, Inuit Eskimos call French Canadians "Uiuinaat" or "Guiguinaat," from the French word "oui" for "yes." Anglophones are known as "Qallunaat."

Considering how hard it is for English-speakers to correctly pronounce words even from other European languages that share our basic alphabet, asking Americans to accurately transliterate words from radically different phonetic structures would appear close to hopeless.

It's become common, for instance, for Western journalists to refer to the "Qu'ran" instead of the traditional spelling of "Koran," but virtually no American understands what sound the apostrophe in "Qu'ran" stands for. Nor could many even produce that sound properly.

Beyond the pronunciation difficulties, outsiders' names are actually often more useful than insiders' names for themselves.

Outsiders can enjoy a broader perspective that lets them see the similarities among ethnic subdivisions. In contrast, insiders can be so obsessed with small differences between themselves and their kin that they can't see the forest for the trees. That's why insiders' names -- like "Inuit" -- sometimes discriminate against smaller groups, such as the Yup'ik Eskimos.

Tom Alton, the editor of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks' Alaska Native Language Center, pointed out, "The name 'Eskimo' is considered derogatory in some areas of the North but is still acceptable in Alaska, mainly because Alaska includes Yup'ik people who are closely related culturally and linguistically but are not Inuit. 'Eskimo' includes Yup'ik as well as Inuit."

Further, the word "Eskimo" is less ethnocentric than is "Inuit," which implicitly draws a distinction between "the people" (the Inuit) and all those non-Inuit. Ironically, the movement to change ethnic names to those used by the groups themselves frequently restores these kind of self-glorifying terms. For example, Comanche Indians are now supposed to called the "Numunuu," which means "the people."

The fashion of renaming the Bushmen of Southwestern Africa as the "San" exemplifies many of the problems with the name game. University of Utah anthropologist Henry Harpending, who has lived with the famous tongue-clicking hunter-gatherers said, "In the 1970s the name 'San' spread in Europe and America because it seemed to be politically correct, while 'Bushmen' sounded derogatory and sexist."

Unfortunately, the hunter-gatherers never actually had a collective name for themselves in any of their own languages. "San" was actually the insulting word that the herding Khoi people called the Bushmen. ("Khoi" is the term used by those who were labeled "Hottentots" by the Dutch. As you can probably guess by now, "Khoi" means "the real people.")

Harpending noted, "The problem was that in the Kalahari, 'San' has all the baggage that the 'N-word' has in America. Bushmen kids are graduating from school, reading the academic literature, and are outraged that we call them 'San.'"

"I knew very well," he said, "That one did not call someone a San to his face. I continued to use Bushman, and I was publicly corrected several times by the righteous. It quickly became a badge among Western academics: If you say 'San' and I say 'San,' then we signal each other that we are on the fashionable side, politically. It had nothing to do with respect. I think most politically correct talk follows these dynamics."

On the other hand, while many ethnicities’ names for themselves are literally something like “the only real human beings,” their names for their neighbors were often less complimentary.

So, what would often happen is that European explorers would arrive in some new found land and ask a tribe, “OK, what’s the name of the next tribe beyond you, the one across the big river” and then innocently phonetically letter in on their maps responses that meant “those disgusting subhuman cannibals.”

So, you can see why it’s a big mess.