Questions Without Answers

Do you ever wake up in the middle of the night with a sudden burning question in your mind? One that you can't stop thinking about, and try as you might you just can't fall back asleep?

I remember a little while back this happened to me. The question was "Why do nearly all animals have 5 'fingers' and 'toes'?" obviously things like birds or dolphins or dogs don't really have digits in the same sense as humans or monkeys, but I recalled seeing skeletons of those animals showing what appeared to be 5 phalanges. After rolling in bed for a couple hours, I eventually started googling. I found that the reason was simple enough- given that all living things are connected via one huge evolutionary tree of life, the obvious-once-you-know-it explanation is that one common ancestor evolved the 5-phalange pattern before branching off into mammals and birds and reptiles etc. I never did really find why 5 was the magic evolutionary number though. Like I remember hearing the theory of dogs having four legs because in the wild, it is not uncommon to lose a leg, and three legs is the minimum needed for them to walk normally. I like this theory because it has a concrete mathematical basis- 3 points define a plane, so for a dog to remain upright on a defined plane, it needs three legs. Obviously two legs is a possibility (see: human legs), but that requires balancing, which is far more difficult for dogs given the shape and structure of their feet compared to ours. So to me, the four leg theory makes prefect sense from an evolutionary standpoint: the minimum number required to function, plus one extra, given that the world is rough and if a man's gonna make it he's gotta be tough, and is therefore likely to lose a leg at some point. The animal with an extra leg is by default more fit to survive than the one without. Meanwhile, the one with two extra legs is probably just redundant, and given that five is an uneven number, it leads to a necessary asymmetry. Since we no nature loves symmetry (see: eyes, ears, fins, flower petals, pinnate leaves, etc.), five legs is probably a no go. and six legs would mean a) twice as many legs as necessary, and b) a rather extreme genetic mutation to lead to such a divergent phenotype. So I'm very happy with the four leg reasoning. I get why many animals have four legs (probably a mix of divergent and convergent evolution), and I get why the magic number is four. The five finger reasoning is a little less satisfactory- I see why all different animals share the trait (divergent evolution), but five being the magic number is still something of a mystery to me. If anyone knows, please let me know.

But I digress. This post is because last night, I once again awoke with a burning question: why are lakes named the way that they are? Ok hear me out. Let's name some bodies of water that aren't lakes. Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, Hudson Bay, San Francisco Bay, Bandon Bay, Panama Canal, Suez Canal, Mediterranean Sea, Adriatic Sea, South China Sea, Black Sea, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Persian Gulf, Puget Sound, Long Island Sound, Mississippi River, Amazon River, Nile River, Zambezi River, Yellow River, Vulga River, Rhine River, etc.. Notice the order of all these titles: (name) followed by (body of water). There are a handful of non-rivers that are in reverse, but all that I can think of are qualified with an 'of' : Gulf of Mexico, Bay of Biscay, Gulf of Thailand, Gulf of Oman, Bay of Bangkok, Strait of Gibraltar, Strait of Magellan, etc. And some lakes also follow this convention: Crater Lake, Laguna Lake, Crystal Lake, Great Salt Lake, etc. But the overwhelming majority are reversed, and with no 'of' to be seen: Lake Chad, Lake Tahoe, Lake Nicaragua, Lake Titicaca, Lake Michigan,  Lake Baikal, Lake Winnipeg, Lake Victoria, Lake Mercer, Lake Mead, etc. So my question is, why? Why flip the naming convention for what seems to be the majority of lakes around the world? One answer on Quora postulates that it is because of differing grammar rules in other languages, so when we translate the names of lakes to english, the order is flipped. But that's a load of crap. If that were the case, why is the same not true for other bodies of water? For example, the Amazon River, in it's local Spanish, would be Rio Amazonas- River Amazon. But we had to problem flipping that order to fit with english naming conventions. And Lake Mead was man-made, created by Americans when we built the Hoover Dam, yet it too has the inverted naming scheme. So why is it are lakes different? I need to know. I've been awake for two and a half hours now thinking this over. Throw me a bone here people.