The Language War and the Venezuela Oil Deal: Two Arguments About What Lasts

The episode opens with a paradox: two governments are going to war over a word—Lake Ontario—and the host finds it funny in the way a man in a good suit walking into a glass door is funny. You feel bad, but you laugh anyway. The argument Canada is making about the lake's 400-year-old name, the host points out, is the exact argument Americans spent fifteen years telling Dan Snyder and Roger Goodell was invalid when they defended the Washington Redskins name as a "badge of honor." The country said, "You don't decide what honor means for somebody else." Now the same argument is back wearing a maple leaf, and "everybody has switched sides without appearing to notice."

The Habit That Outlasts Every Empire

The host walks through fifteen years of language changes—the Washington Commanders, the Cleveland Guardians, the Eskimos becoming the Elks, Squaw Valley becoming Palisades Tahoe, Aunt Jemima becoming the Pearl Milling Company, "master bedroom" becoming "primary bedroom," "manhole" becoming "maintenance hole," "Hispanics" becoming "Latinx" (which about three or four percent of Hispanics have ever used). Then the same impulse turns toward geography: Gulf of Mexico becomes Gulf of America, Fort Bragg becomes Bragg again (honoring a different Bragg on paper), and now Lake Ontario becomes Lake America.