the émigré Canadians' brawl: Concavity vs. Convexity — the naming brawl

The émigrés' terminological quarrel dramatizes the whole cartopolitics: "I think you mean Great Concavity, Alain." — "I meant Great Convexity. I know what is the thing I meant." — "Concavity damn your eyes!" The same wounded ground is a concavity from the U.S. side (the bite taken out of the map) and a convexity from the Canadian (the bulge dumped onto theirs), and the brawl over which word is "the thing I meant" is the grievance in miniature: the two nations cannot even agree on the name of the shape, because the name encodes whose loss it is. (n177's official-spin-vs-street-argot sorts this; cross-ref.)