Look. Look. The world has seven jillion more pressing issues than the matter of international toponymy. But i’ve been staring at maps for long enough that i’ve got some strong opinions, and there’s a lot of confusion to be resolved.

First and foremost: one of the Congos is gonna have to take one for the team. There’s no way about it. I get that “Zaïre” is kind of skunked, but at the very least, one of them should consider making “Congo-Kinshasa” or “Congo-Brazzaville” official, to spare us all the tyranny of having to repeat “Democratic Republic of the Congo” a thousand times until we die.

The other main snafu of nomenclature is Dominica and the Dominican Republic: two countries, both of which are in the Caribbean, and both of which have the demonym “Dominican”, except stressed on different syllables. (Dominica on the -ni-, the republic on the -mi-.) This is not tenable.

The republic is the better known Dominica, but i’m going to say it should draw the short straw here, because it has a ready-made alternative right in the national anthem, which honours its valiant Quisqueyans. Not only would the name “Quisqueya” put them in the élite ranks of countries whose names start with a Q¹, but it’s far more mellifluous than the other isle’s equivalent, “Waitukubuli”.

The Central African Republic might be better off going by the Sango “Bêafrika”, too. The name worked when it was the Central African Empire, high on Bokassa the butcher’s tinpot monarch dreams, but in a world of sixty-second attention spans, most of the time, it’ll end up shortened to CAR and confused with a Honda Civic.

We’re getting into pettier territory now with New Zealand, Britain’s antipodean twin² and runt of the Anglosphere. I don’t particularly have anything against its current name, but when the alternative is this good, that’s hardly enough! Throw off your Dutch trappings and become Aotearoa, land of the long white cloud — culture war be damned, it rolls off the tongue like honey from turned wood. (And, hey, you finally get a usable adjectival form.)

Lightning round! Equatorial Guinea is neither crossed by the equator³ nor anywhere near the other two Guineas. Fix it. South Africa means the opposite of “North Africa” is “Southern Africa“ and is overall terribly generic. “Azania”’s the obvious pick, but historically inaccurate at best, being the Greeks’ name for what is now the Tanzanian and Kenyan coast. Might i suggest “Macrobia”, the opposite of Hyperborea, the semi-mythic land of the long-lived and happy at the very tip of Africa, beyond where the Romans ever ventured? And “United Arab Emirates” is trivially true, but boring as sin. The worst part is there’s no compelling alternative, with the area being an artificial conglomerate of princedoms once called the “Trucial States” because… er, they’d all signed truces with the British Empire. 10/10 naming, bang up job, good enough, let’s all go home.

Last, the bald eagle in the room: the United States of America, hogging the name of two entire continents all for itself in typical Yankee fashion. For all i care, they can keep it: the alternatives are straight trash. “Usona”? “Fredonia”? “United Statesians”?? Gods know nobody’s saying that with a straight face. Plus, it’s really funny when people from the rest of the Americas get riled up online about people using the word “American” for the U.S.

All that said — if they were to change, they’d do well to go back to the civil war, and start branding themselves as “the Union”, rather than “America”. All the historical swag, none of the cringe.

P.S. “Britain” is also ambiguous between the island and the country, but my preferred solution there is to make Northern Ireland the republic’s problem. Sorry, Sir Ian junior, but you’re reëntering the EU, and you’re going to like it.