Hey Vsauce, Michael here. I'm sorry. Look, I didn't name myself but
apparently Michael is the ninth most disliked baby name for a boy - according to a survey by BabyNameWizard.com At least it didn't top the charts like the rhyming a 'den' names - Jayden, Brayden, Aiden. The most disliked name for a baby girl, by the way, was Nevaeh - 'heaven' backwards. Names can be more than just
controversial - they can also be just plain wrong, or misleading. MISNOMERS And I'm not talking about the daughter of Mr. Nomer. Over the summer I went to Singapore and I saw many many things. I saw an infinity pool, the world's largest
column-less glass house, beautiful beautiful orchids, including the laboratories where scientists
genetically design custom orchids and very very humid air that condensed all over my cool glasses. But even after I cleaned my glasses off I didn't see any Lions. In fact, it's believed that no Lions have ever naturally lived in Singapore, even though Singapore comes from a Malay word for Lion City. It's believed that in 1299 when Sang Nila Utama named Singapore, he mistakenly thought that a tiger he saw was a Lion. It's a misnomer. But here is the biggest mystery of them 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 have made a video about misnomers and that guy hasn't. This photo was from May, and since May I have been to Australia, New Zealand. The guy in these photos has never been there. I am similar to that guy but he's not exactly me. We can resolve this problem by realising that oranges are apples You see, in Old English the word 'apple' was used to describe apples, but also any fruit in general. For instance, dates were 'finger apples' and bananas were 'apples of paradise'. Cucumber's were 'Earth apples'. In French the word for '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 Orange's originated in the East. But this leads us to an even bigger
question: what came first orange, the fruit or orange, the colour? Well, the answer is neither. The tree came first. The word 'orange' comes from the Sanskrit
word for the tree that these fruits grow on. Before being introduced to these fruits the English-speaking
world called this colour not orange, but yellow-red. The first recorded use of the word
'orange' to refer to the colour, instead of the fruit, wasn't until 1512. So the colour was named after the fruit, which was named after the tree that it came from. But what's a fruit? Well, botanically a fruit is a part of a
flowering plant that disseminates seeds, like an apple or an orange or a lemon or a grape. In cooking, because they're 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 aren't fruit, like 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 veggies we put on our pizza is the mushroom. Of course, mushrooms aren't really vegetables because they aren't even plants. They're fungi. Names can also be confusing because of Stigler's Law - our tendency to name things not after who discovered them, or
originated them, but instead to simply honour someone else. Venn diagrams are cool. They were named after John Venn in the 1880s, although Leonhard Euler actually introduced them in 1768. And Avogadro's Constant? Not actually discovered by Avogadro. He proposed that such a number could exist but it was a different guy who discovered the exact figure. Straight up misnomers 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. Nothing about this is officially called Big Ben. Its real name is The Elizabeth Tower. People often say that the bell inside is named Big Ben but even that's not true. The main bell inside Elizabeth Tower is officially called The Great Bell. The Great Bell's nickname is Big Ben and we have since applied that nickname for a bell to the entire tower. Kosher salt isn't actually kosher, it's just used to make things kosher, to draw blood out of meat. So really it should be called Koshering salt. The Rocky Mountain Oyster of course
is not seafood - it's a fried bull testicle. Arabic Numerals are not Arabic, they were invented in India but introduced to Europe by Arab mathematicians. Haley's comet is named after Edmund Hayley but had been witnessed by people at least as early as 240 BC. Peanuts are not nuts, they're legumes, and coconuts are not nuts, they're drupes - stone fruit, like cherries, apricots, peaches, etc. French fries, as they are especially known in America, are not from America but were probably named by
British and American soldiers during the First World War, who discovered
them where they were likely 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
kind of look like they are and egg plants don't grow eggs. Eighteenth-century cultivators simply thought they kind of resembled eggs. Dry cleaning isn't dry at all, it involves lots of wet liquids but just not water. And, silly guy, hamburgers are not
named after ham, the pork product, they're named after
Hamburg, Germany. Probably because at Hamburg citizens who emigrated to the US and brought their minced beef patty, a
Hamburg steak with them. Guinea pigs are not pigs at all, they're just similar looking to pigs - kind of. And Greenland isn't green land at all, it's believed
that about a thousand years ago Erik the Red named it Greenland hoping that
the name would trick settlers into coming over. We drive on parkways and park on driveways not because work makers want to confuse us but
because the park in parkways refers not to stopping a car but to the
nature parks parkways often run along. Skeuomorphs are design elements that today are merely ornamental, even though in the past originally they had a purpose. For instance, on a modern mobile phone the icon for phone call is shaped like an old phone. The icon for e-mail is shaped like an old snail mail envelope. Or, when you take a camera phone picture, you hear the sound of a mechanical shutter, even if your phone doesn't have one that
makes that noise. Older cameras did, so the new ones do too. It's a skeuomorph. Your own name is a kind of skeuomorph. Let's call it a skeuonom. It was necessary at birth your parents gave it to you but before
they knew exactly what you would be like when you grew up. You have changed since you were born but your name has stayed the same. When we called it 'The Moon', we didn't know that we would find other moons in the solar system. When you
were named no one knew how you would change, or what you would become, and you change frequently. You change many, many times over the course of 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 a second you change
costume, cells die and new ones are born. And, at the atomic level, with the
exception of non-living things, like tattoos and piercings, every five years pretty much every single atom in your
body is replaced. So to what degree is the future or past you, really you now. Robert M Martin puts this in a really cool perspective
in his book 'There Are Two Errors in the the Title of This Book*' "That person, who will have your name in the very far future, will be connected
only very tenuously to the present you. The person will remember very few of
your current experiences, will be psychologically quite different,
will have a body that resembles your present one only a bit, and contains almost none of the same matter. So it seems that this person is the
future you only to a small degree. In a way, in terms of memories and experiences in history, you have more in common with a
stranger today than you do with yourself 10 or 20
years ago." Martin goes even further, saying why be afraid of death if the future you who dies will resemble
you today so little? Well, to that I say YOLO? Well, it's probably more accurate
to say YOLOBLOMLMTAASOSBTDPWKEOBOIODAW- CHEOBOITOD. You only live once, but living once means
living 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.
wtf. I was always told french fries were called so because they were fried frenched potatoes. As in frenching is a culinary name for cutting produce in slices. Seems way more credible
Thank you very much for this /u/Michael_Stevens
You are now an honorary Belgian!
I don't want to kill the fun but I thought the origins of "French" fries were very unclear and the "frites namuroises" hypothesis shaky?
This is the source wikipedia refers to (French) and it indeed seems that you have to take the Belgian claim with a grain of salt.
I'm frustrated by the name 'French' fries when Belgians were the 'inventors' of fries and should therefore be called Belgian fries. This is a very interesting video about misnomers and this is a misnomer. This video skips to a short part in the video about Belgian fries. You should now all be able to explain why it's Belgian fries and not French fries.
FREEDOM FRIES FTW
Educating the masses as always. Yay Vsauce!