Misnomers

Hello Vsauce, Michael here. I'm sorry. Look, I didn't name it myself, but apparently Michael is a boy's ninth least favorite baby name, according to a survey by BabyNameWizard.com. At least it didn't top the charts as names that rhyme with a 'den': Jayden, Brayden, Aiden. By the way, the most disliked name for a girl was Nevaeh, "heaven" backwards. Names can be more than controversial: they can also be simply wrong or misleading. ERONYMOUS NUMBERS And I'm not referring to Mr. Nomer's daughter. During the summer I went to Singapore and saw a lot of things. I saw an infinity pool, the world's largest pillar-less glass house, beautiful orchids, including laboratories where scientists genetically engineer custom orchids, and very, very humid air condensing on my cold glasses.

But even after cleaning my glasses I didn't see any Lions. In fact, it is believed that no Lion has ever lived naturally in Singapore, even though Singapore comes from a Malay word meaning Lion City. It is believed that in 1299, when Sang Nila Utama named Singapore, he mistakenly thought that the tiger he saw was a lion. It's a misnomer. But here's the biggest mystery of all: did I really go to Singapore? I mean, look at these photos. That guy certainly looks like me, but he's not exactly like me. I made a video about inappropriate names and that guy didn't.

This photo was from May, and since May I have been in Australia, New Zealand. The boy in these photos has never been there. I'm similar to that guy but he's not exactly me. We can solve this problem by realizing that oranges are apples. You see, in Old English the word 'apple' was used to describe apples, but also any fruit in general. For example, dates were "apples" and bananas were "paradise apples." Cucumbers were "apples of the earth." In French, the word "apple" acted similarly, giving us "earth apple" for the potato. In the Middle Ages, the old French word for orange meant "apple of the orange tree." And the Swedish word for orange still means "apple" from China because the orange originated in the East.

But this brings us to an even bigger question: what came first, the orange, the fruit, or the orange, the color? Well, the answer is none. The tree came first. The word "orange" comes from the Sanskrit word for the tree on which these fruits grow. Before knowing these fruits, the English-speaking world did not call this color orange, but yellow-red. The first recorded use of the word "orange" to refer to the color, rather than the fruit, was not until 1512. So the color was named after the fruit, which was named after the tree it came from. But what is a fruit?

Well, botanically a fruit is part of a flowering plant that spreads seeds, like an apple, orange, lemon or grape. In cooking, because they are not sweet, we tend to call things like wheat grains and bean pods vegetables, even though they are actually fruits. Vegetable is a culinary term for other edible parts of a plant that are not fruits, such as roots or leaves. Corn on the cob tastes like a vegetable, but scientifically corn kernels are fruits, which means that corn on the cob is really just a bunch of fruits packed together. One of the vegetables that we put on our pizza is mushroom.

Of course, mushrooms are not really vegetables because they are not even plants. They are mushrooms. Names can also be confusing because of Stigler's Law: our tendency to name things not after who discovered or originated them, but simply to honor someone else. Venn diagrams are great. They were named after John Venn in the 1880s, although Leonhard Euler introduced them in 1768. And Avogadro's Constant? In reality, Avogadro did not discover it. He proposed that such a number could exist, but it was another guy who discovered the exact figure. Totally inappropriate names are my favorite. French horns are not French.

Your funny bone is not a bone; It's a nerve. The ulnar nerve. And this is not Big Ben. None of this is officially called Big Ben. Its real name is The Elizabeth Tower. People often say that the bell inside is called Big Ben, but even that is not true. The main bell inside the Elizabeth Tower is officially called The Great Bell. The nickname of the Great Bell is Big Ben and we have since applied that nickname to the entire tower. Kosher salt isn't actually kosher, it's just used to make kosher things, to extract blood from meat.

So it really should be called koshering salt. The Rocky Mountain oyster, of course, is not seafood, it is a fried bull's testicle. Arabic numerals are not Arabic, they were invented in India but introduced to Europe by Arab mathematicians. Haley's Comet was named after Edmund Hayley, but had been witnessed by people at least as early as 240 BC. Peanuts are not nuts, they are legumes, and coconuts are not nuts, they are drupes: stone fruits, such as cherries, apricots, peaches, etc. French fries, as they are known especially in America, are not from America, but were probably named by British and American soldiers during World War I, who discovered them where they were probably invented...

Belgium. Now, since French was the official language of the Belgian army, the soldiers may have mistakenly thought they were in France. Koala bears are not bears, they just appear to be bears, and eggplants do not produce eggs. 18th century growers simply thought they looked like eggs. Dry cleaning is not dry at all, it involves a lot of wet liquids, but not water. And, silly, hamburgers are not named after ham, the product of pork, but after Hamburg, Germany. Probably because in Hamburg the citizens who immigrated to the USA brought with them their minced meat, a Hamburg steak.

Guinea pigs are not pigs at all, they just look similar to pigs, more or less. And Greenland is not green land at all; It is believed that about a thousand years ago Erik the Red called it Greenland in the hope that the name would fool settlers into coming. We drive on avenues and park on avenues not because workers want to confuse us, but because parking on avenues does not refer to stopping a car, but to the natural parks that avenues often pass through. Skeuomorphs are design elements that are merely ornamental today, although in the past they originally served a purpose.

For example, on a modern mobile phone, the phone call icon is in the shape of an old telephone. The email icon is shaped like an old postal envelope. Or, when you take a photo with your phone's camera, you hear the sound of a mechanical shutter, even if your phone doesn't have one that makes that noise. Older cameras did it, so new ones too. He's a skeuomorph. Your own name is a kind of skeuomorph. Let's call it skeuonom. It was necessary when you were born that your parents gave it to you but before that they knew exactly what you would be like when you grew up.

You have changed since you were born but your name remains the same. When we named it 'The Moon', we didn't know we would find other moons in the solar system. When you were appointed no one knew how you would change or what you would become, and you change often. You change many, many times throughout your life. You learn things, you forget things, you meet people, you stop talking to people. You experience things for the first time, at a cellular level millions of times per second you change your costume, cells die and new ones are born. And at the atomic level, with the exception of non-living things like tattoos and piercings, virtually every atom in the body is replaced every five years.

So to what extent is the future or the past you, really you now? Robert M. Martin puts this in a really great perspective in his book 'There are two errors in the title of this book*' "That person, who will have your name in the very distant future, will be only very tenuously connected to the The person who introduces you will remember very few of your current experiences, will be psychologically quite different, will have a body that will only slightly resemble the current one and contains almost none of the same matter. So it seems that this person is the same future only. small measure.

In terms of memories and historical experiences, you have more in common with a stranger today than you did with yourself 10 or 20 years ago." Martín goes even further, saying why be afraid of death if the future you who die will look so little like today's? Well to that I say YOLO? Well, it's probably more accurate to say YOLOBLOMLMTAASOSBTDPWKEOBOIODAW-CHEOBOITOD. You only live once, but to live once means to live many times, as a series of similar but technically different people who know each other, but only in one direction, and who can help each other, but only in the other direction.

And as always, thanks for watching.