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Old 11-19-2003, 10:11 AM   #56
Grojlach
Zartan
 

Join Date: May 2, 2001
Location: Ulpia Noviomagus Batavorum
Age: 44
Posts: 5,281
Quote:
Originally posted by Ramon de Ramon y Ramon:
America is a village in the part of Germany that once was East Germany - and the title of a recent, fairly sucessful movie whose protagonists were raised in said village.
It's also the name of a small village in the Dutch province of Zuid-Limburg.

And by the way, the name "America" itself is a result from one of the biggest scams in history. When the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller had to decide a name for the new continent that he quite literally put on the map, he coined the name "America" in the honour of Amerigo Vespucci - who in those days claimed to have beaten Columbus in the European race to North America. While in retrospective it's fairly certain that Vespucci lied, the name had already stuck in people's minds and was used for the entire continent in result.
It's rather amusing that the name for half the world immortalizes a scam, though.

[ 11-19-2003, 10:12 AM: Message edited by: Grojlach ]
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