What's in a name?

Last night I found myself watching a painfully unfunny comedian from New York (imagine that...) who miraculously brought up an issue in his bit that has been bouncing around my head for a while now. He posed the question, "why do we feel the need to rename other countries?" For instance, why do we look at Espana, and turn around and say, "Nope, we're calling you Spain." It's an interesting phenomenon that has always puzzled me, though we as Americans are not the only culprits, and it's not always a bad thing (in China, the United States is called "Meiguo", which tranlates to "the beautiful country"--a very nice gesture, which goes a long way in explaining their obsession with photographing EVERYTHING they see!--but I digress)

This phenomenon is not limited to countries, though. We do it with people entering the country as well. I'll use my good friend Steve "The Sizzler" Andon as an example (hope you don't mind buddy). Note that his last name is Andon. As the story goes, the very first "Andon" to enter the country was Mister Andon Papasian, who was deemed to have an unacceptable name by some clown at Ellis Island, and was given the more American name (and by American, I mean the American verision of Italian) Anthony Andon ("the first shall be last and the meak shall inherit the earth...yada yada yada").

This is all well and good I suppose, but it doesn't just stop with foreign countries, or immigration officials. The question that started it all for me was in fact: When, exactly, did Cristobol Colon become Christopher Columbus? I'm fairly confident that he didn't pass through Ellis Island on his way into the not yet named America (though I'm sure it did have a name, just not one we like to write in history books), and if he did he would've received a name like "Chief Sails-In-Circles" or "Whitey Likes-the-Pipe", but certainly not Christopher Columbus.

I'm still hoping that one day we can stop the linguistic pissing contest of trying to rename every foreign thing in our own language in a lame attempt to domesticate it, and allow places, people, and whatever else to have the name that they were originally given (though I really don't know how we'll get our hands on Adam's original list)