Before renaming Lake Ontario, America should take a look at the history of its own name

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Charles Spearin is a Toronto-based musician whose bands include Do Make Say Think and Broken Social Scene.

I have a small, slightly compulsive hobby: looking up the origins of words for fun. Nothing professional. I just like to know. Often there’s a surprise tucked inside a word that upends its meaning. Muscle means “little mouse.” Disaster means “bad star.” Companion means “someone you share bread with.” It’s trivia, but every so often it playfully reframes a word you’ve said 10,000 times.

A few years ago, I was chewing on the word “America.” I knew the name Canada came from the St. Lawrence Iroquoian word for “village,” but I didn’t know the root of America. A Latin word for liberty, maybe? Seemed plausible. “America means freedom” is a quote you can pin on Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and probably others. I’d always assumed it meant something along those lines. It had just never occurred to me to check. So I did. My Googling led straight to a man named Amerigo Vespucci.

Who?

America, the Americas, are named after a person? I’m no historian, but I’m at least curious about things. I read. I don’t live in a hole. How had I never heard of this guy? Where are the monuments, the paintings, the musicals? (Apparently, there was once a statue of him at the Library of Congress. It was destroyed by fire in 1851 and never replaced.)

My digging revealed that Amerigo Vespucci was not, by the standards of the Age of Exploration, a particularly consequential guy. He was a Florentine merchant who kept the books for the Medici family, made a handful of voyages to the New World, and deduced, correctly and ahead of Columbus, that they hadn’t reached Asia after all. It was something new. He called it the New World. That’s basically the résumé. He certainly didn’t discover the Americas. He didn’t circumnavigate the globe. He didn’t even have a particularly long career at sea. Amerigo Vespucci was a one-hit wonder, the Right Said Fred of the cartography world, and he has been quietly dining out on his royalties ever since.

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The modern spelling came from a German cartographer named Martin Waldseemüller, who was putting together a new world map and needed something to call this fourth continent. Europe, Asia, Africa: all female names. So he took Vespucci’s first name, Latinized and feminized it, and wrote AMERICA across South America in fresh ink. Waldseemüller apparently thought better of it almost immediately. Later editions of his own maps quietly dropped the name, possibly thinking, Why didn’t I call it Martinica? But by then it was too late. It was on other people’s maps, in other people’s books. You can’t un-print a continent.

And Amerigo, of course, was his first name. America wasn’t named after his family line. If it had been, we’d be living in North Vespuccia, above the United States of Vespuccia.

So this brings us to his mother, the real source. In 1454, in Florence, a woman named Lisa Mini had a son. And she named him Amerigo. A fairly ordinary Florentine name at the time, chosen for reasons lost to history. She could not have known that half a millennium later, a nation of 340 million people would build its entire identity around her son’s first name, that the mere word “American” would light a fire of patriotism in their bosoms, and that almost a third of the landmass on the planet would bear his name. If she’d preferred another, Giuseppe, Antonio, Luigi, things today would be ... different.

I play in a band that crisscrosses the United States a lot, which means a lot of downtime in green rooms and diners, perfect conditions for cornering people with a very unscientific poll: “Have you heard of Amerigo Vespucci?” I ask. About nine in 10 people say “no” and then wait for me to say something like, “He’s the bass player for such-and-such band, and he’s just put out a sick solo record.” Instead, I get to the fun part. I say, “He’s the guy America is named after,” and then I watch their face, in real time, as a single word, a word they’ve grown up with, a word they’ve saluted and sung, turns into some guy’s name.

Then: “What!?”

Why Amerigo the man has been largely erased from history seems to come down to the fact that he got so much undeserved credit early on that it became embarrassing for teachers and historians to justify. And that the narrative “America means freedom” is more likely to inspire a person to pick up a rifle or get a tattoo than presenting a Renaissance painting of an old man with a lugubrious expression and saying, “America is that guy.” However it happened, America is now thoroughly divorced from Amerigo, and the new myth is giving something closer to the divine than the Florentine.

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Which brings us to now. Last month, in the middle of a trade war he started, Donald Trump signed an executive order renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” His stated reason was that Canada has been “ripping us off.” Google Maps complied within days. The Board on Geographic Names has 30 days to make it official.

Which, from my perspective, is low-key hilarious because the truth of the story makes a much better case for humility than for hubris. America essentially pulled its name out of a hat. The Josh of the 15th century.

But this is where we are. The President has used federal power to strip a Wendat name off a Great Lake, a name that predates the United States, predates Canada, predates the very idea of either, and replace it with a word that traces back to nothing more than a Florentine bookkeeper’s mother’s taste in baby names.

Also, Lake America? That’s the flex? That’s the “we won’t get ripped off anymore” gesture? There’s a mouse in that muscle. From this shore, it feels petty, uninformed, and, honestly, kind of funny. It’s Lisa Mini’s baby boy getting another present.

We are in a trade war with America, and I have a call to arms. Etymologically, it’s time to poke a hole in the inflated state of America. To have a laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing from the ground up. Odin and Thor were once worshipped as actual gods. Now they’re literally just Wednesday and Thursday. When you hear songs like “America the Beautiful,” picture a glowing little Italian bambino.

And together we can Make Amerigo Great Again.