If Joseph Smith wrote the Book of Mormon, using names where he lived in Western New York (Holley), he failed miserably to include the word “lake” as Western New York is filled with lakes, including the world renown “Great Lakes.”
The word “lake” never occurs in any of the 600+ geographic references in the Book of Mormon.
Strange, unless it was not fabricated.
Within the text of the Book of Mormon it makes sense, since the primary writers Mormon & Moroni never saw a salt water ocean and had no need to differentiate between it and fresh water bodies. This view gels with a geography model in Western New York, not Mesoamerica, the party line.