The Etymology of Patagonia

The other day I was telling a friend about a type of fish I actually enjoy eating. This is a big deal because I hate most types of (cooked) fish. Strangely, I enjoy many types of raw fish in the form of sushi. But I digress.

The one cooked fish I like is called Chilean Sea Bass. (Of course, it is also ridiculously expensive. Such is my luck). My friend commented that the name amused him because it was made up by an American merchant in the 1970s, and its actual name is "Patagonian toothfish."

I am someone endlessly fascinated by etymology, so this piece of information sent me down a rabbit hole. Near the bottom of the hole was a question: Why is the region at the southern end of South America, shared by Chile and Argentina, called "Patagonia"?

It turns out we have the famous Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan to thank. According to Wikipedia, he first used the root of the term in 1520 to describe the native tribes of that region. The people of these tribes were apparently much taller than Magellan and the members of his expedition. Some legends have them as tall as 10 or even 15 feet — although a more reasonable, basketball-player height of 7.5 feet tall seems more likely. In any case, these people became known as the "Patagonian giants."

Why "Patagonian"? For years, people believed it was a derivation of pata, Spanish for "foot." They contended Patagonia means "Land of the Big Feet." However, it turns out Magellan was actually invoking a character from a popular novel at the time. The novel is about the many adventures of a Greek hero named Primaleon and features a story about how he confronted a savage giant named Patagón.

In reaching for a modern analogy to explain this naming, I could only come up with one well-known giant from my childhood: the TV mascot for Green Giant frozen vegetables. This made me chuckle as I imagined Magellan and his buddies trying to figure out what to call a new tribe of Wilt Chamberlains they had discovered and deciding on the "Jolly Green" giants. 

If that had been the case, I guess my favorite fish today would be "Jollygreenian toothfish."

Further Reading

• "The Invention of Chilean Sea Bass," Priceonomics
• "Fantastically Wrong: Magellan's Strange Encounter With the 10-Foot Giants of Patagonia," Wired, 2014

Discrimination Is Rare

“Beginning broadly, it appears that most of the respondents (about 75%) reported either having never, or only rarely, been discriminated against in their day-to-day lives. Individual responses can be observed across racial categories, with this same pattern of discrimination experiences reported within the different racial categories. For all racial and ethnic groups represented in the data, the majority reported experiencing either none or infrequent discrimination.”

Source: "The prevalence of discrimination across racial groups in contemporary America: Results from a nationally representative sample of adults," PLOS ONE

Statue of Liberty: Gift ... Or Scam?

Talking during a movie is usually frowned upon, but sometimes a well-timed quip can add to the entertainment. Such was the case during a viewing of Independence Day in 1990. Aliens had just blown up several US monuments. When they obliterated the Statue of Liberty, the theater went silent for a moment and my dad blurted out: “Hey! That was a gift!” Laughter filled the theater.

My dad's recent retelling of that tale recently made me snicker (again), and then it reminded me of the true story behind our most famous monument. Legend has it the French gave the statue to the US as a gift and symbol of friendship. The real story is more interesting. Parade magazine has the shortest retelling. My even shorter summary follows.

The designer of the Statue of Liberty, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, did not originally design the statue for America. It's a colossus because it was designed for Egypt (think the Sphinx), and it was meant to be a lighthouse for the Suez Canal. What's ironic is that Lady Liberty is actually a slave girl. The loose-fitting dress she wears is that of a fellah, or Egyptian slave.

When the Egypt deal fell through, Bartholdi repurposed the idea for America. To raise government money for the project, he traveled all over our nation, visiting Washington D.C., Chicago, LA and Niagara Falls among other places. When that didn't work, he went the P.T. Barnum route back home and raised money from the public itself. "He put on spectacles of wonder in Paris, charged visitors admission to watch the statue’s construction in a dusty workshop, sold souvenirs, and petitioned the French government to let him run a national lottery," according to Parade. However, he was still short and needed funding from America.

Enter Joseph Pulitzer, the newspaper magnate for whom the Pulitzer Prize is named. Pulitzer took on the challenge and concocted a brilliant marketing ploy to raise money and boost his newspaper circulation. He promised to print the name of every person who made even the tiniest donation toward the project. This ultimately closed the gap and also gave people a great reason to buy Pultizer's newspaper.

The Parade article has some other fascinating details. Taken together, they not only correct the myth that the Statue of Liberty was a gift from the French government but also make the whole thing sound an awful lot like a scam. Women's rights groups certainly felt that way. "When it was unveiled in October 1886 ... [they] lamented that an enormous female figure would stand in New York harbor representing liberty, when most American women had no liberty to vote," Parade recounts.

Who Took the Christ out of Christmas?

When you see "Xmas" instead of "Christmas," what do you think? Are you one of the many people who has been persuaded that this is an affront to Christianity started by a cabal of heathens? Maybe you've lamented how secular December 25th has become and then declared with zeal, "Let's keep the Christ in Christmas!"

There's just one problem: Heathens didn't take the Christ out of Christmas. In fact, the opposite is true. As Daven Hiskey writes for Today I Found Out:

It turns out 'Xmas' is not a non-religious version of 'Christmas.' The 'X' is actually indicating the Greek letter 'Chi,' which is short for the Greek [Christos], meaning 'Christ.' So 'Xmas' and 'Christmas' are equivalent in every way except their lettering.

Who started it? According to Hiskey, it was "a very popular practice, particularly with religious scribes" from a millennium ago. This makes sense since one of the earliest Christian symbols was an abbreviation/combination of the first two Greek letters of Christos known as the Chi Rho (shown below). Now you know!

So why do people believe the 'heathens' myth? There are several persuasive elements to the story we can explore.

First, it fits a narrative created by religious persuaders to stir the passions of God-fearing folks. In their view, unbelievers are not just your ordinary citizen next door, they're part of a secret conspiracy to undermine the religious foundations of our nation.

Not helping matters are all the high-profile actions of certain atheist organizations. The only time many Christians hear or think about those of no faith is when some group purporting to represent them is protesting nativities or suing to remove the Ten Commandments from public places. This forms a lasting impression that readily comes to mind when a myth like the above is shared. Thanks to behavioral economics (i.e. Kahneman & Tversky), we have a name for this phenomenon: the "availability heuristic." When examples in support of a myth’s premise spring readily to mind, we will tend to overweight those examples and fail to think about counter-examples. The mind thinks, "Heathens are just the sort of people to do that kind of thing because of that protest and that other lawsuit I remember reading about.”

Finally, there's the psychology of myth-spreading in general. Think about so-called "urban legends" and how many people you know believe them. There are several reasons, but the most basic is that they spread via people we know and trust. In other words, they utilize Cialdini's sixth principle of persuasion (consensus aka social proof).

Let's say you go to church on Sundays. If several of your fellow parishioners, perhaps even the pastor himself, have used "Xmas" to help sermonize about "keeping the Christ in Christmas," that's all the proof a lazy mind needs to conclude that Grinch-like heathens are trying to steal the very letters from "Christmas."