“Ontario” is not some Canadian nationalist name stamped onto an American lake. It is much, much older than Canada. In fact, the name is older than the United States. The word Ontario comes from an Iroquoian name connected to the water itself. Depending on the translation, it has been rendered something like “sparkling water,” “beautiful lake,” or “great lake.” By 1660, European maps and writings were already using Lacus Ontarius for the lake. A map from just a few years later labeled it Lac Ontario ou des Iroquois. Think about that timeline. The name Ontario was being used for this lake more than a century BEFORE the Declaration of Independence and more than two centuries BEFORE the modern Canadian province of Ontario was created in 1867. (Michigan) In other words: Lake Ontario was not named after Ontario, Canada. If anything, the historical relationship runs the other direction. The Canadian province inherited a name that had already been associated with this region and its waters for generations. That distinction matters. Calling Lake Ontario “Canadian” because Canada has a province named Ontario is a little like assuming the Mississippi River was named after the state of Mississippi rather than recognizing that both inherited an older geographic name. Donald Trump just signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” I think it’s ridiculous. And what makes it especially ridiculous is that the entire premise seems to misunderstand why it is called Lake Ontario in the first place. The lake can be part of America without being named America. That seems like an increasingly difficult concept for us to understand. Geographic names are not necessarily declarations of ownership. They are pieces of history. They tell us who came before us. They preserve languages. They remember settlements, peoples, battles, explorers and civilizations that existed long before our current political arguments. Sometimes the strange old name is precisely what makes a place interesting. And this is where I find the whole thing especially ironic. For years, conservatives have rightly mocked the modern progressive tendency to believe that if we simply change the terminology, rename the institution or replace the words on the sign, we have somehow changed the underlying reality. We have argued that reality is not altered by vocabulary. I agree. But that principle doesn’t suddenly stop being true when the other side is holding the Sharpie.