What's in a name?

In 2013, Qtel (Qatar's leading telecommunications company) decided to rebrand themselves as Ooredo. Ooredo has a very visible presence in Qatar today, being one of their leading telecommunications companies, but there is still evidence of Qtel's existence in utility infrastructure throughout Doha. 

I'm a little obsessed with these covers because in Arabic it phonetically spells out Qtel...like kyoo-tell:

And it just makes me laugh a little every time I see one of these because the Q in Qtel is obviously for Qatar...and in Arabic Qatar starts with a ق (q), not a ك (k). Perhaps I'm just easily amused. 

Anyway, Ooredo essentially means "I want" in Arabic and was "chosen...to reflect the aspirations of our customers and our core belief that we can enrich people’s lives and stimulate human growth in the communities where we operate.” And those communities are rather widespread! They also have telecommunications holdings in Indonesia, Kuwait, Oman, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, Maldives, and Palestine.

The Ooredo branding allowed the company to get all their acquired companies under one parent-company umbrella. 

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The Persian Gulf is frequently referred to as the Arabian Gulf (or simply as "The Gulf") on this particular side of The Gulf, though the name hasn't achieved global traction. Thinking about renaming things made me laugh about the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America (which a little less than 1/3 of Americans actually want) and, just today, about a certain president declaring that Lake Ontario shall henceforth be known as Lake America. 

It's very Endora-coded behaviour, I think. 

There's a line Endora (Samantha's mother) says that runs through my mind every now and then (season 2, episode 18). When Darrin and Samantha first have their baby and Endora appears and says she's fine with whatever name the couple picks because, "Whatever you call her, I shall call her Tabatha."

It always just felt so ridiculously entitled to me—but that's Endora for you. 

And perhaps it's a bad example because in the end Darrin agrees to name the baby Tabitha (of course that's only after Endora engages in all kinds of shenanigans to gaslight Darrin into agreeing, of course). But the ridiculousness of the entire situation feels remarkably similar to all these executive orders (*cough*vanity projects*cough*) renaming various entities. 

At the end of the day, everyone will just call it whatever they'd like, anyway. 

So Ontario it remains (for most of the world). 

As Prime Minister Carney so level-headedly wrote: 

"The name Lake Ontario comes from the Wendat word Ontari’io, which, appropriately, means “the lake is beautiful, the lake is big”. 

The name is more than 400 years old, predating both the Confederation of Canada and the Declaration of Independence of the United States of America. 

We know that America is changing. Their trading relationships, their foreign policies, their national monuments, their hydronyms.  

Canadians also know that naming reality means calling it Lake Ontario – then, now and always.

Whatever you call it, Mr. President, we shall call it Lake Ontario.