From today's qotd mailing:

Amerigo Vespucci (1454–1512)

Amerigo Vespucci was born at Fiorenze (Florence, Italy) on this day in 1451. As a youth he read widely, collected and copied maps, and studied briefly under Michelangelo. He became an agent of the Medicis and was dispatched to Spain in 1492. While there he learned of ships and navigation, and made four voyages to the New World, exploring far more of the coast than Columbus, but his first voyage wasn't until 1499. Although he wasn't the first, he was the first to comprehend that this was not the Indies — Columbus died believing he had reached Asia. One German cartographer labeled South America as "America" in Vespucci's honor, and even when he changed his mind the name had stuck…

In honor of the birthday boy, I republish this lowercase liberty classic:

Monday, November 27, 2006 proud to be misnomerian I'm proud to be an American. I won't try to defend that pride: it's based mostly on things I had no responsibility for and no control over, which puts the pride in the same camp as many other collectivist emotions, but I can't pretend I don't feel it just because I think it's irrational. One of the things I'm proud about is that "American" is a contested word — contested by another entire continent (not to mention 2 other nation-states on my own continent). There's something very fitting to me about the label being so over- and underdefined. No one calls me a United Statesian, even though that would be a more accurate description of my official statist citizenship. Another thing I'm proud of about the American label is that it comes from the phenomenal PR genius Amerigo Vespucci — not because he discovered anything, but because his maps and stories promoted curiosity and fantasy about this New World back in the Old World. (And I'm proud to descend from the cultural and economic history of that Old World.) We United Statesians somehow managed to get primary claim to the term "American" even though Amerigo's maps were of SOUTH America. The nerve of us. Meanwhile, the people of the extended gene pool of those the Pilgrims feasted with are called Indians (unless you're politically correct enough to call them "Native Americans," which would make you a sequacious numskull, since the term literally means anyone born in America — wherever that is (as you know, my own favorite term is Amerindividual, but that's not very helpful, since I'm a native-born Amerindividual myself)). They're called Indians because Columbus thought he found them in India. To distinguish them from the real Indians in real India, they came to be called American Indians, which still begs the where-is-America question. Lest we let the Europeans get too smug about this absurd tangle of longstanding misnomers, let me point out that France and England are both named for German tribes (which isn't so much a misnomer as it is a little confusing), Scotland literally means "The Land of the Irish," (and Ireland does not mean the Land of Ire — though it sure sounds like it does), and finally, the name "Spain" comes from the Phoenician word I-Shaphan, meaning "The Island of Hyraxes." Is Spain an island? No. What's a Hyrax, you might ask? Wikipedia tells us that they are any of 4 species of small, thickset, herbivorous mammals living in Africa or the Middle East — but not in Spain. That's like naming my part of the world "the satellite of penguins." I'd love to hear more examples of misnomerian nationalities. posted by bkmarcus on Monday, November 27, 2006 (permalink)

"A map is not the territory it represents, but if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness." – Alford Korzybski, 1879–1950