What's in a Name?

I was thinking about Burma and Siam the other day.... "Huh?", you ask. And well you should. Because they aren't known by those names anymore. Burma is Myanmar and Siam is Thailand.

These are not the only countries to undergo name changes. In my time, I recall Rhodesia, The Belgian Congo (which has undergone several name changes), and Ceylon. These have all changed names. Not to mention the breakup of French Indochina which resulted in the creation of Laos, Vietnam (after first being two countries then one), and Cambodia (which became Kampuchea then Cambodia again, I think).

But what bothered me most was Beijing... which was Peiping then Peking and now the aforementioned Beijing.  How does that happen? I can see how a pronunciation might be misunderstood  and how that might lead to a name change phonetically but only two of the three are close.

Apparently, name changes happen all the time. Some to straighten out mispronunciations  but a lot are because of political changes and revolutions.

All of this brings me around to the naming of a child "Messiah"... which a magistrate in Tennessee has decided should not be done. So she changed the baby's name to "Martin" for reasons I cannot quite understand.

But there may be a clue in the following excerpt from the story:

His mother, Jaleesa Martin, and father, Jawaan McCullough, who are not married, couldn't agree on a last name for their baby, now 7 months old. That's why they ended up in the courtroom of Child Support Magistrate Lu Ann Ballew.

They couldn't agree on the last name of their child... Why? And so the magistrate (they keep calling her a "judge", which is almost the same but not quite) decided the first name needed to be changed?

Have we all gone mad?