The New Rules of Orthography

Alright. So, I was thinking about the name as I drove into the area by surprise. Chargoggagoggmanchauggagoggchaubunagungamaugg. Try saying that 10 times. Quickly. How will a man who puts his name on everything he touches, like a dog pissing on a fire hydrant, cope with this? Towers. Steaks. Lies. He stamps everything he approves in gold ridden, mind numbing, eye watering, senseless propaganda: In letters so big they blot out the sky. He doesn’t build things. He brands rot. And it’s always an ugly mess, a gaudy scream that means mine.

Now imagine that mind, that vast, hungry emptiness, encountering this string of letters by a pond in Massachusetts. That name is a lock his key won’t fit. His tongue, built for two syllables—great, sad—would stumble on the first cluster. Char-gog- and already the gears smoke. He’d get red. OK, more orange. He hates what he can’t swallow, what he can’t flatten into a slogan. He can’t pronounce it, so it’s an enemy. It’s elite. It’s a conspiracy by the deep state of Webster’s Dictionary.

So he’d do what he always does. He wouldn’t learn it. He’d kill it. With a stroke of a sharpie, on some torn scrap of policy, he’d mandate it. From today, this failing, disgusting lake, total mess, is TRUMP LAKE. The best lake. Beautiful. And just like that, the fifteen G’s, the whole stubborn, ridiculous history, the poem nailed to the post screaming Touch not a G!—all of it gets paved over with six letters in tacky, illuminated script. They’d have to change the signs. Probably sell the naming rights to some pill magnate. They’d dredge the bottom and put in a fake waterfall and a golf cart path. The water, already choking, would turn the color of a bad tie.

Because that’s the final move. The end of the world isn’t a bang, it’s a branding. It’s not that we lose our history; we let it be replaced by a trademark. Gogg and Magogg shouting thunder? They’ve been outsourced. The new gods don’t shout. They sue. The beacon of the town won’t blaze with renown—it’ll flicker with a bankrupt casino’s neon, reflected in water nobody can afford to drink.

We’re not just practicing for doom. We’re signing a licensing agreement for it. The last patch of earth not named for him will fall, and it’ll be a place like this. Not because it’s important, but because its name was a knot he was too lazy to untie. So he’ll cut it. And his followers will cheer, and they’ll buy the t-shirts, and they’ll never know that the silence they’re swimming in used to have fifteen G’s in it. Used to have a sound of its own.