What does 'Idaho' actually mean?
Ridiculous History
iHeartPodcasts
4.2 • 4.7K Ratings
🗓️ 10 January 2019
⏱️ 23 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Idaho was the 43rd state admitted to the Union, and today it's well-known for potatoes, mining, and stunning forests -- but, even in the modern day, Idaho is home to a surprising mystery: What does its name actually mean? Join the guys as they explore the ridiculous origin story of Idaho's name.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the show Ridiculous Historians. |
| 1:27.2 | It's not so much an origin story of a state as an origin story of a state's name. |
| 1:33.2 | Yeah, it's the old What's in a name turns out quite a lot and a lot of disagreement and a lot of fraudulent claims and all kinds of stuff. |
| 1:41.0 | This is, you know, on the surface seems like could be a dry episode, not the case, my friend, not the case. |
| 1:46.6 | Quite juicy, yeah, and there's a bit of a mystery here as well. |
| 1:50.5 | And I guess one of the best ways for us to start off today's episode is just by acknowledging something that is an unspoken truth here in the US. |
| 2:01.7 | State names are weird. They feel relatively arbitrary at times. |
| 2:06.6 | And there's not a ton of cohesive, coherent logic or uniformity involved, right? |
| 2:13.8 | That's true. You've got like New York, right? That makes sense. There was another York somewhere and this is the new one. |
| 2:20.2 | Right. Clearly the better York. It's clearly, it's definitely the latest model. There's no new New York. |
| 2:27.6 | But then there are states like Mississippi, there are states like Hawaii, there are states like, I don't know, I don't know. |
| 2:33.4 | How do you feel about this? The states that are named in relation to other states, North Dakota, South Dakota seems like a cop out to me. |
| 2:40.5 | There's no just Dakota. No, yeah, exactly. North Carolina, South Carolina. |
| 2:44.9 | Yeah, Carolina, I believe, was named after a monarch. Yeah. And then oddly enough, Virginia and West Virginia. |
| 2:52.5 | There's no East Virginia. Also true. That's weird. It could, it's a weird thing. |
| 2:57.3 | Well, because as it turns out, most of these state names were done by committee. |
| 3:02.1 | So as what as typically happens when things are done by committee, you end up with something convoluted that no one really likes that much, |
| 3:09.0 | but people kind of settle on. Oh yeah. Like in the 1996 Olympics here in Atlanta, Georgia. |
| 3:16.7 | Time for the creepy mascot. Yeah. What was that guy's name? What's it? |
| 3:20.6 | Easy. Easy. Thank you. So yeah, he sort of looks like a weird little like a blue drop. He's a blue, |
| 3:28.1 | like exactly like a blue droplet of water with like Saturn rings around him and big tennis shoes. |
| 3:34.6 | They're the Olympic rings. No, I'm sorry. Excuse me. Of course they are. How could I be so foolish? |
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