Misnomers

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 and 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 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 instance, dates were 'finger apples', and bananas were 'apples of paradise'. Cucumbers 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 oranges 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 Halley 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 eggplants 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 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 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.