I think “Lake America” is silly, and I’d rather get that out of the way up front. Lake Ontario has been Lake Ontario for hundreds of years. Nobody was sitting around thinking, You know what would really improve my life? If Donald Trump renamed one of the Great Lakes. On August 27 he signed an executive order directing the federal government to call it Lake America anyway, which is political theater: symbolic and unnecessary.

Watching parts of the left absolutely lose their fucking minds over it, though, is hilarious. Suddenly these people have discovered an incredibly important principle, namely that you can’t just change the name of something because you don’t like the old word.

Oh, really? Welcome to the party, pal. Where the fuck have you been for the last ten years?

Apparently we can’t have a master bedroom anymore; it’s the primary suite. Master/slave became primary/secondary, blacklist and whitelist turned into blocklist and allowlist, and homeless is now unhoused. Mother becomes gestational parent. A pregnant woman is a pregnant person, and breastfeeding can become chestfeeding. Latino and Latina somehow became Latinx, a word created largely for people who overwhelmingly don’t use it themselves, and on and on it goes.

Now, some language changes are perfectly reasonable. Words go out of date, and some terminology really is unnecessarily dehumanizing, so calling someone “a person with schizophrenia” instead of reducing their entire existence to “a schizophrenic” makes perfect sense. That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about performative linguistic purification, the increasingly fashionable belief that if you change the label you’ve somehow changed the underlying reality.

Take the master bedroom. The worry is that master might remind somebody of slavery, even though there’s no established historical connection between the real-estate term and slavery, so now it’s the primary suite. Think about that. Nobody discovered the master bedroom had secretly been oppressing the guest bedroom, and nobody found Harriet Tubman chained to the walk-in closet. It’s still the biggest fucking bedroom. We changed the word and congratulated ourselves for accomplishing something.

The technical world is just as ridiculous.

I’ve spent my life around computers, electronics and systems where master/slave described a relationship between components, one controlling or coordinating another, and in the military generators could be synchronized together using the same sort of terminology. Apparently the electrons became offended. Change it to primary/secondary if you want, I genuinely don’t care, but let’s not pretend racism decreased because somebody updated the engineering manual. The equipment is the same equipment, the relationship is the same relationship, and reality didn’t move an inch. Somebody changed a label. Achievement unlocked.

Where this gets considerably more serious is when we stop renaming things and start redefining categories. “Pregnant woman” becomes “pregnant person” because someone who identifies as a man can retain female reproductive anatomy and become pregnant, and biologically that’s entirely possible. But look at what actually changed. Human reproduction didn’t; male reproductive anatomy didn’t suddenly develop a uterus. The definition of man changed. Under the traditional sex-based definition, “a man can become pregnant” is biologically impossible, while under the gender-identity definition man can include a biologically female person who identifies as male, so the sentence becomes linguistically true. That’s the entire trick in miniature: the biology stays put and the category moves.

Fine. Society is allowed to reconsider categories. Make the argument, debate it, persuade people. Just don’t change the dictionary and then pretend we’ve discovered some stunning new fact about mammalian reproduction that humanity somehow overlooked for a few hundred thousand years, and don’t pretend the definitions don’t have consequences.

This is where feminism runs face-first into modern gender politics. Feminism spent generations arguing that sex matters, and women’s shelters, women’s prisons and women’s sports exist for a reason. So do sex-specific medical research, pregnancy protections, changing rooms and protections against male violence, because being biologically female can matter enormously in particular circumstances. Nobody called that misogyny. It was considered recognizing reality in order to protect women.

Now another progressive principle says that excluding transgender women from some female categories because of biological sex can itself be discriminatory. Okay. There’s a legitimate conflict there, and eventually somebody has to say which principle wins, because you cannot simultaneously insist that sex-based boundaries were created because biological sex matters and then insist that biological sex becomes irrelevant whenever recognizing it conflicts with gender identity. Sometimes those principles collide: women’s sports, women’s prisons, women’s domestic-violence shelters, women’s locker rooms, medical statistics. Saying so doesn’t require hatred or cruelty toward transgender people. It requires admitting something adults used to be capable of admitting without bursting into flames, that two groups can have legitimate interests that conflict, and compassion for one doesn’t magically erase the other.

The really clever part is that language can settle the argument before it even starts. Redefine woman to include transgender women. Declare that women’s spaces therefore must include transgender women. Then describe anyone arguing that some spaces should remain separated by biological sex as someone trying to exclude women from women’s spaces.

See what happened? You change the definition, use the new definition to resolve the dispute, and call anyone using the old one a bigot. That isn’t merely updating terminology; it’s using terminology to win the argument before the argument begins.

And sometimes this linguistic crusade gets downright comedic. Take Latinx. Institutions decided Latino and Latina weren’t inclusive enough, so somebody bestowed Latinx upon an entire population, the tiny problem being that almost nobody wanted it. Pew’s 2026 report found 54% preferred Hispanic, 30% preferred Latino, and only 1% preferred Latinx. One fucking percent. There’s something magnificently paternalistic about creating a supposedly inclusive word for millions of people who respond, Please don’t call us that, and answering: don’t worry, we know what’s inclusive for you.

Which brings me back to Lake America, which I still think is stupid. When critics say “It’s been Lake Ontario forever!” I agree. “The existing name has meaning!” Yep, agreed again. Then comes “Changing the name doesn’t actually change anything!” and, holy shit, keep going, you’re almost there, because that’s exactly the point.

A homeless man’s life doesn’t improve because you call him unhoused. Calling a bedroom primary doesn’t make it less racist, and a generator doesn’t become morally enlightened because you renamed the slave connection. Human biology doesn’t change because you’ve revised the terminology surrounding it, and Lake Ontario won’t become fundamentally different because Donald Trump calls it Lake America.

Sometimes language should change, since words genuinely do become inaccurate, obsolete or needlessly cruel. But increasingly we’ve confused changing language with changing reality, and the reason is that changing language is easy. Fixing homelessness is hard; renaming it is easy. Improving women’s healthcare is hard, and rewriting the terminology surrounding motherhood is easy. Resolving complicated conflicts involving sex and gender is really fucking hard, while changing the definitions and declaring anybody who disagrees a bigot is much easier.

That’s symbolic politics in its purest form. Change the sign, update the style guide, issue the memo, congratulate yourself, and go home convinced you’ve improved civilization, when you haven’t necessarily changed anything. You’ve just renamed it.

So yes, Lake America is ridiculous. But the people who spent the last decade running perfectly functional English through the ideological rename machine suddenly discovering the sacred importance of traditional names? That’s fucking priceless. Sometimes changing a word is progress, and sometimes it’s simply a new label slapped on the same old box, and reality, inconvenient bastard that it is, doesn’t give a shit what you named the box.