Are words magic? Or no?
On Tuesday the White House broke with decades of precedent and blocked Associated Press reporters from attending two of President Trump’s media availabilities. The AP said it was blocked because it hasn’t changed its stylebook entry for Gulf of Mexico to “Gulf of America.”
The newswire’s executive editor, Julie Pace, immediately condemned the action. And in a followup letter on Wednesday to White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, she signaled a likely legal challenge.
The actions “were plainly intended to punish the AP for the content of its speech,” Pace wrote, adding that “the AP is prepared to vigorously defend its constitutional rights and protest the infringement on the public’s right to independent news coverage of their government and elected officials.”
At Wednesday afternoon’s briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested the ban may remain in place.
Leavitt confirmed that the dispute is over a body of water. “It is a fact that it is now the Gulf of America,” she said.
Ahhhhhhh no it isn’t. That’s where you go so very wrong. It also, by the way, wasn’t a fact that it was the Gulf of Mexico.
The fact would be something like: the official name of this body of water is, in English, the Gulf of Mexico. The new fact would be the same but with the final word changed from “Mexico” to “America.” There are no facts about what the body of water’s name actually is, because names for bodies of water and mountain ranges and planets are human inventions rather than facts.
This does not change just because it’s Trump who says the new name is Gulf of America.
Comments
6 responses to “Facts and names”
Has anybody asked the gulf what it identifies as? And what pronouns it uses?
This is Caligula battles Neptune territory.
I’ll continue referring to it as the Gulf of Mexico. But I’m a reasonable person, and in the spirit of compromise, I will refer to Trump as “el golfo de América”.
(And at the risk of ruining the joke by explanation, see the third translation here.)
In related news, U. S. Representative Buddy Carter has introduced a bill to rename Greenland “Red, White, and Blueland.” https://buddycarter.house.gov/uploadedfiles/redwhitebluelandact.pdf
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to believe that this stuff isn’t some sort of highly elaborate satire.
Is Representative Buddy Carter even a real person?
Read a comment to the effect of “AP banned for refusing to respect the Gulf of Mexico’s preferred pronouns”. I was amused.