Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Somehow the unsettled Maine coast is full of charming little
English villages. Also, as a special bonus: no Indians!
It's hard for Americans to understand the patriotism that can get bound up in place-
names. We're a young country. We're also accustomed, in our cockeyed cowboy fashion,
to everything else revolving around us, so we can afford to let slide the fact that, say, the
Gulf ofMexico isn't called the Gulf ofAmerica. (Although, according to JohnHébert, that
is the pet issue of one frequent complainant to the Board on Geographic Names.) If Amer-
ica Ferrera announced tomorrow that she was changing her first name to “Canada,” we'd
be okay with it. We'd get on with our lives. But elsewhere in the world, toponymy
is
na-
tional identity. The imported Western atlases I saw on Korean shelves as a kid always had
the words “Sea of Japan” blacked out on the Asian maps and the traditional Korean name,
“East Sea,” hand-lettered below. Greece got so angry about the name of the newly inde-
pendent Republic of Macedonia (historically, Macedonia was a region of northern Greece)
thatitblackballedMacedonia'sentranceintoNATOin2008.Thehottestrhetorichascome
outof(surprise!)Iran,afterthe2004editionofthe
National Geographic Atlas of the World
added to the Persian Gulf a smaller parenthetical label reading “Arabian Gulf.” Iranians
sensed a conspiracy and went bonkers. “
Under the influence
of the U.S. Zionist lobby and
the oil dollars of certain Arab governments, the society has distorted an undeniable histor-
