I’m sick of referring to countries by names that sound nothing like what the residents of the country call their homeland. Poland isn’t called Poland. It’s called Polska. Germany is Deutschland. Japan is Nihon. There’s no reason why English speakers (and everyone else is the world) can’t call nations by their true names. Some spelling changes may be required (especially in cases where the same letters don’t exist in our alphabet), but that’s no big deal. The point is that we should all be calling countries by the same name.

We’ve come pretty far down the path of assigning (sometimes seemingly arbitrary) names to countries simply to make them easier to pronounce. It’s time to reverse this trend.

Right now I’m thinking this initiative is going to be about as popular as my “the teens are stupid numbers; from now one eleven will be tenty-one, twelve will be tenty-two, thirteen will be tenty-three, etc.” initiative.