Does it matter what we call ourselves? What descriptive words we use to carve out our identities? Am I a different person if described as a Mainer rather than a Phippsburgher?

Several years ago I helped an editor of a weekly newspaper in Wiscasset come up with a descriptive single word that didn’t sound like a character in “Star Trek.” We tried Wiscasseter, Wiscasseteens. And I think we settled on Wiscasseterians. But Mainer is still used because it’s convenient; from the state of Maine to Mainer is just one letter, like America to American. Noun to adjective. (Best writing advice: destroy all adjectives. Period.) But the word is boring. How about from now on we simply call residents of Maine residents of Maine, as in “residents of Maine showed up at the polls …”?

Next door we have those crazy people who are so anxious about life they put it on their license plates: Live Free or Die. Do we call them New Hampshirites? Hampshirians? And while we’re on the subject, whatever happened to Old Hampshire?

If you’re from Bath you wouldn’t want to be called a Bather or a Bathatonian. Or would you?

Sometimes history takes over, shining a spotlight on a little-known corner of the world. A good example is the country that was once called Siam, whose king, Chulalongkorn, was motivated to enter the modern age by taking back the name of the country. So in 1939 Siam became Thailand, and has been Thailand since.

And what about Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which was for centuries called Constantinople. Why they changed it is nobody’s business but the Turks.

But we’re not through with Wiscasset. For many years, a sign on Route 1 declared the town was “the prettiest village in Maine.” Upon seeing the sign the first response was usually, “Sez who?” There were enough jokes about the Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plant that no one questioned the source of “the prettiest.”

In 10 years covering the town as a journalist, the closest I could get to a definite answer was a legendary story that the “prettiest village” was a publicity stunt to get readers of National Geographic to vote on which town was prettier. This competition culminated in the little-known Coastal Wars (1935-39), when bands of irate Waldoborites and Damariscottians and Thomastonians, fueled by Moxie, organized night raids up and down the coast, destroying tons of picturesque postcards of quaint main streets with their canopies of Dutch Elm trees. A time seldom talked about in local libraries.

Often, a name change is the result of history. In the 1960s Western colonial powers bestowed freedom on their dependencies. Thus the Republic of Upper Volta became Burkina Faso, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe and, in Asia, the island nation of Ceylon became Sri Lanka.

Thailand (Land of the Free) was and still remains the only country in Southeast Asia to avoid colonialization. Its position between the French in Indochina and the English colonizers of Burma and India provided a buffer when WWII distracted the colonial powers long enough to change the country’s name from Siam to Thailand. It also transitioned from an absolute monarchy to a constitutional monarchy, which stands today.

It was Thai King Chulalongkorn whose story provided the plot (sort of) for Rodgers and Hammerstein’s musical “The King and I.”

I don’t believe Siam is in use today as a geographical location, and so I propose that New Hampshire become New Siam with a license plate that proclaims “Live Free or Whatever” and we call such people who live in the Granite State, New Siamese.

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