Did you notice (of course you did), that the name of Antarctica is the same as the name of the Arctic, but with the added prefix “anti”?
How did it all start?
You might have shrugged it off by thinking, that the explorers decided, “Welp, we do have one huge frozen wasteland on one side called the Arctic, and here we have this other huge frozen wasteland on the other side. “Let’s just add Anti to the name to signify it’s on the other pole and be done with it”. And yeah, that sounds like a very explorer-like thing to do.
Explorers are not bred to be creative, you know. I mean, we are talking about people who decided that naming a land that they just found “New Found Land” was brilliant. Creativity in naming is not exactly a primary feature of an explorer. And that would make for a reasonable explanation.
Except it’s not true.
The true naming of the Arctic and Antarctica is even less creative than this. You see, the word “arktos” in Greek means… bear. And the word “anti” means “not.” So the early explorers that stumbled upon the Arctic thought to themselves, “Well, this is a cold, crappy place, but there are a damn lot of bears here. Let’s call the place Bears and be done with it. Let’s go south. The weather is better there.” And so they did. Until they arrived in Antarctica, where they noticed quite a lot of similarities with the place in the north, but with no bears. So, as any reasonable person would do, they called the place “No Bears”.
And now we have to live in a world with two massive icebergs on both ends called Bears and NoBears.
However, with the rate at which climate change is progressing, we might soon end up with two No Bears.
So, we established that creativity is not the strong suit of explorers. But what do you guys think? What is the most sought-after quality an explorer should have?
