Renaming Veterans Day (and other terrible ideas)

Trump keeps bluntly mandating name changes to dominate, highlighting the worst abuses of a unique human power

- JOANNA DAVIDSON GUEST CONTRIBUTOR

AMID THE DAILY cacophony of crises and cruelty, the renaming continues. Perhaps you've noticed? As soon as he stepped back into the Oval Office, the president renamed the Gulf of Mexico and Denali. And the administration insists that the Persian Gulf be called the Arabian Gulf. On his first day as secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth renamed North Carolina's Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg. Now Hegseth himself has a new title: secretary of War.

Thankfully, these efforts don't always work. When the president proposed renaming Veterans Day as "Victory Day for World War I," veterans' groups objected. Rather than focus on military victory or a single conquest, they reminded him (and all of us) that Veterans Day is meant to honor all who have served and sacrificed. The president's feint at renaming Veterans Day proved so unpopular that it fizzled away. But other renamings ensued.

It would be comical, this scrubbing and dubbing of names within and beyond the president's dominion, if it weren't so grotesque.

As an anthropologist, I have studied and taught about many kinds of naming practices. All human societies name. We name people, places and things. Naming practices have long intrigued anthropologists because of their simultaneous universality and their breathtaking diversity. How a society names can tell us a lot about the concepts, attitudes and values that define it.

For instance, among Jola villagers on the West African coast, where I have conducted ethnographic research, one of my closest friends is named Sipalunto — a lovely name made of syllabic hints that, when deciphered, mean "a hippopotamus crossed there." This would be unintelligible unless you know the backstory: Sipalunto's mother overheard some spiteful gossip in a rice paddy that hippopotamuses had recently ravaged and most people were avoiding. The gossipers thought they were safely out of earshot, but their breach was captured and preserved in Sipalunto's name.