The distinction is that before Trump decided to hijack it for political purposes, the US government put a lot of thought and work into official names.

For big things like the gulf of Mexico, or lake Ontario, there shouldn't be a lot of confusion. But what about the little creek by your house? A series of inlets on a coastline? What if you have dozens of places with the same name; how do you differentiate? What if you have regional local names that differ from the name that outsiders use? What if you have competing names in general parlance? When you type it into a gps, where will it send you?

The U.S. Board of Geographical Names handled all these issues and more, and had been a trusted authority on place names, that mapmakers, businesses, and other governments all trusted to do a good job.

Still today, you can check out the GNIS and find out all kinds of cool stuff. Try searching for "Sugarloaf" to find all the mountains people named after a common thing, or "Denali" or "Washington"; you can find a lot of cool stuff on here, including alternate names for places. (https://www.usgs.gov/tools/geographic-names-information-system-gnis)

It is disgusting that the republicans are destroying years and years of slowly building trust and doing good work that helps all Americans because (check notes) it would be funny if he decreed the name were stupider?

I know, just messing

Yeah, and?

1. If you actually edit OSM, you know there's zero compelling reason to make an application that prefers official_name:en-us. Want to know how I know? Because instead of wasting my time making something up to be outraged at, I went and looked up how often this key shows up. It's six (it shows five, but it hasn't updated for Lake Ontario yet). In the entire world among billions of key uses, this one is used on six objects. This will not ever happen; it's complete nonsense.

Even if it were made (it will not be),

2. Nobody would use it. Literally what on Earth usefulness could it possibly have within the already niche ecosystem that is OpenStreetMap? My dude, my guy, if they were targeting bullshit names Trump made up with an EO, they could just soft fork an existing OSM application and then hardcode in "Gulf of America" and "Lake America".

And most importantly,

3. It doesn't matter. That's what the official_name key exists for – to distinguish it from the name people actually use. That's why it's a separate key to begin with.

You're complaining about OpenStreetMap being accurate, and in order to do that, you have to invent some fever dream application that nobody would ever create and nobody would ever use – and that even were they to create it, they could've accomplished it more easily by just hardcoding six values.

"When available". lol, lmao even