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Comment by rickdeckard

> "In the situation with the Gulf, it's unambiguously true that the "primary, common, local" name used in the US"

And that's my point. It depends on how "primary" or "common" is defined, the article has no definition of it. Who gets to decide that, Google?

The easy (and predictable) cop-out is to follow a governments definition of what is "the expected primary and common name", and then show that name in brackets.

The only restriction this "definition" seems to set is that your country needs to be adjacent to the landmark to define its name, so "a ruler" cannot decide to rename e.g. Australia unless he is either "the ruler" of Australia or of a country adjacent to it.

And we're back to square one.

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EDIT: Yes, I also read this sentence: "By saying "common", we mean to include names which are in widespread daily use, rather than giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming.".

The question remains how to quantify "widespread daily use".

It creates room to justify against an immediate change of a name, but doesn't define when this criteria is reached.

And from all I see, all this doesn't seem to matter anyway, because a new local naming will anyway be added in brackets (see Gulf of Mexico). What am I missing?

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