The Order has lately received inquiries concerning the body of water east of Erie, which, according to certain maps issued south of the Canadian border, is now to be called Lake America.

We have checked.

It remains a lake.

This is not a trivial distinction.

A lake is a large inland body of water, usually surrounded by land and, in exceptional cases, by two countries with strong opinions about stationery.

The Order has no objection to names. Names are useful. They allow one to distinguish a lake from another lake, a government from another government, and one regrettable decision from the next.

But a name is not merely the word printed upon a map.

Maps are useful things. Governments are useful things. Both have, from time to time, mistaken their usefulness for authority over reality.

The lakes are considerably older than either.

For centuries people have named these waters, crossed them, feared them, fished them, drowned in them, prayed upon them and attempted, usually unsuccessfully, to predict what they would do next. Their names have changed before. Some were imposed. Some were translated poorly. Some replaced older names that deserved better keeping.

The Order therefore holds no particular superstition that an old name must remain simply because it is old.

But neither do we accept the opposite proposition: that a name becomes true because a sufficiently important person has announced it from a sufficiently important desk, preferably while surrounded by flags.

A real name acquires weight.

It accumulates in logbooks and harbor records. It appears in fishermen's stories and family histories. It is spoken by the people who live along the shore. It survives storms, governments, wars, corrected charts and generations of cartographers.

It is not generally created by changing the label in a database and instructing several thousand civil servants to pretend not to notice.

A name is, in this sense, less like a title and more like a stone made smooth by handling.

Lake Ontario has been called many things by many peoples, long before there was an Ontario, a Canada or a United States. Its present name descends from an Indigenous linguistic tradition older than all three.

That fact alone should encourage a certain humility.

It should also discourage the renaming of a very large body of water after an entire continent, particularly when the continent in question contains several other countries, none of which appear to have been consulted.

The Order is not empowered to determine what the government of the United States prints upon its maps. Nor, regrettably, have governments shown much inclination to consult us before making such decisions.

Our concern is simpler.

The Fifth Sea does not become something else because someone changes the stationery.

Nor does it become more American because America has been written upon it in a larger font.

If, a hundred years from now, sailors, residents, cartographers and children standing on its shore all call it Lake America, then Lake America it shall have become.

If they do not, then some future historian will find the proclamation in an archive, pause over the phrase “Lake America,” and wonder whether the government had recently suffered a shortage of other problems.

This is how names actually work.

They are proposed by authority.

They are repeated by habit.

They are granted by time.

Occasionally, they are rejected by everyone who has to use them.

So, until the water itself expresses a preference, the Order will continue to record the easternmost Great Lake under the name by which generations have known it:

Lake Ontario.

Should the lake wish to submit a formal objection, it may do so through the usual channels.

The usual channels are currently underwater.

The lake, we are pleased to report, appears unconcerned.