60 Band Name Origins in 60 Minutes

As someone who churns out tens of thousands of words a week—everything from emails to blog posts to business documents to these radio scripts—I’ve developed a fascination with words and, for whatever reason, names…especially the origins of names…

The study of word origins is “etymology”…and the study of name origins is “onomastics”…

Take, for example the name Ignatius…this is an ancient name dating back to the Etruscans, the civilization before the romans…a lot of dudes were named “Ignatius” over the centuries…

When Spanish came along, it morphed into Ignacio, which was often abbreviated to “Nacho”…fast-forward to 1943…Ignacio Anaya lived in Piedras Negras, which is just over the border from Eagle Pass, Texas, home to a U.S. military base…

One night some American soldiers came to his restaurant looking for something to eat…with almost nothing in the kitchen, he wiped something up featuring deep-friend tortillas cut into triangles, covered in cheese and served pickled jalapeno peppers…the soldiers loved the improvised snack so much that they named it after their host: Ignacio “Nacho” Anaya…

But there’s another part to the Ignatius story….back over in Europe in Bavaria, Ignatius transformed into Ignatz…the short form for that was “Nazi”…this is how “Nazi” came to denote a backwards peasant from the Bavarian countryside…

This is the same part of Germany that gave rise to a political party called “nationalsocializmus” led by a guy called Adolph Hitler….those who thought Hitler was a clown, abbreviated “nationalsocializmus” to “Nazi” as a way of calling the party a bunch of boobs…it was a taunt, an insult…

But Hilter and his crew turned everything around and took the term “Nazi” as their own and—well, things turned out badly for the planet…

But isn’t that kind of cool?...there’s a connection between something as diverse as German fascists and a plate of junk food that’s great for hangovers…

What if we apply this sort of scholarly etymological and onomastical research to the names of musical groups?...let’s do that…hang on…a lot of data is about to come your way…

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