Every single day, we refer to friends and family members by nicknames. This doesn’t seem too weird to most of us because we know their full names and are consciously making the decision to shorten them. With characters from television, movies and advertisements, however, we often use the nickname without ever realizing we don’t know what they came out of the womb as. For example: do you know Cookie Monster’s real name? It’s Sid. Do you know who you’re visiting when you land on “Just Visiting” in Monopoly? The answer is Jake the Jailbird, and judging by his picture, he’ll take any company he can get.
Popular YouTube channel Mental Floss is know for the sometimes goofy and irreverent subject matter it chooses. From grammar mistakes to bizarre medical conditions to units of measurement, fans never have any idea where the hell the Green brothers will mine for new material, but no matter where they stick the mental shovel into the Earth to look for tidbits, they always take the challenge seriously. Yes, they might make jokes, but they never fuck around for so long the quality of the material gets compromised. It’s always a healthy and loveable amount of snark.
It’s really hard to pick a favorite name from all of the forty-four that appear in this video, but I guess if I had to select, I’d take Patricia “Peppermint Patty” Reichardt. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve mentally thought, “I wonder what Peppermint Patty is short for”, and for whatever reason, I’ve never gotten off my lazy ass and checked. Fortunately for me, John Green apparently reads my mind and is able to just hit me with the information I’ve long forgotten I’m looking for.
Since it’s Comic Con week, and people who aren’t attending could use some distractions, I’ve gone ahead and embedded another Mental Floss video below. This one is called 41 historic demises, and it’s crammed full of the type of fascinating history information we all should have learned about while we were in high school. In fact, if this making YouTube videos thing never works out, John Green would be an incredible high school teacher. His students would love him, but he also respects the material too much to cut corners, which is the formula for a great educator.
