In fourteen hundred and ninety two Columbus gave Spain the potatoooo.
Sorry.
Today's podictionary word brought to you by GoToMeeting. Try it free for 45 days by following the link www.gotomeeting.com/podcasts Christopher Columbus brought potatoes back to Europe from Haiti. At least he brought the name for potatoes.
The name had originally been batata but somehow the pronunciation got mangled as it changed from a native American word to a Spanish word.
But even though the things Christopher Columbus brought were called potatoes , they were not what you and I recognize as potatoes today. They were sweet potatoes.
Potatoes as we know them had also been discovered by Europeans in the Andes Mountains in the 1530s. But because sweet potatoes had already gained a foothold in Europe by that time, these new arrivals—which in the Quechua language were known as papa —began to be called Virginia potatoes or bastard potatoes because they looked kind of like what Europeans knew as potatoes, but they were somehow different.
As time went on more and more people began growing and eating these new-fangled bastard potatoes.
At that point the bastard potatoes were more widely known than what had been plain old regular potatoes so naturally the more popular of the two took over the name potato .
That left the old potato with a confusingly identical name, so people added sweet to it and now it's know as a sweet potato . It appears that although these two food crops were relatively new to all of Europe, it was in English that this name swapping first happened.
The Oxford English Dictionary points to a few sources that were using the Quechua name papa before even the bastard potato name arose. One of these was a guy named Francisco Pizarro.
His name jumped out at me because it was he who toppled the mighty Inca Empire and took over Peru for the Spanish.
Since this sort of abuse took place all the time you might wonder why Pizarro's case is of any note. Here's why: Pizarro had chutzpa by the boatload. He arrived in the Inca kingdom and somehow arranged for a personal meeting with the king. Pizarro rolls into town with his 200 soldiers and the over the hill comes the king with his 80,000 troops.
The king feels fairly secure since he outnumbers the Spanish 400 to one.
However the king has two problems.
One is that he doesn't know what a rotten bastard Pizarro is. The other problem is that he's never seen European weapons or horses before. The result is that he allowed himself to be cornered with only a handful of unarmed guards; the Spanish cut everyone to ribbons except the king; Pizarro extorts three full rooms of gold and silver; and then he kills the Inca king anyway and takes over the whole country.
