How the Guppy Got its Name

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

In 1854, a bright young Englishman who went by the name Robert John went off to Oxford University.

And he was something of a prodigy.

He taught himself to read at three, and he was a very promising student.

But he soon received letters from a relative begging him to come home and take over management of the family estate in southwestern England.

And when I say estate, I mean estate, because this was Kinnersley Castle, which is on the border with Wales.

And it’s this huge medieval structure.

But he didn’t want to do that.

And so instead, he ran off to see the world.

He went to Australia.

He went to Tasmania.

And then he was shipwrecked off the coast of New Zealand.

And he was rescued by some of the Maori people who lived there.

And so he ended up living with them for a couple of years.

And eventually he made his way to Trinidad, and he was really passionate about paleontology and biology and also education,

So much so that he eventually became the first superintendent of public education there in Trinidad.

He was fascinated by fish there in the tropics, and in particular a fish that was known as the rainbow fish or the million fish.

This was a little bitty, tiny, tiny fish, and they called them million fishes because there were so many of them.

In one school. And so he gathered some samples of that and sent them off to the British Museum.

And they were so impressed with his work that they named this little fish after Robert John,

Whose full name was Robert John Lechmere Guppy.

Oh, how cool is that?

Wait, his last name was Guppy?

Guppy.

When you said his name was Robert John earlier, I was like, I don’t know anything called the Robert John.

The John is just going to be the origin of the toilet.

The Robert Earl.

But they named the guppy after this guy.

After Mr. Guppy.

How about that?

Yeah.

And I think probably, as is often the case, somebody else had found this fish and written it up, but he’s the one who got the credit for it.

It’s often the case.

Yeah.

The coiner or the originator often doesn’t get the glory.

Yeah.

Well, that’s the story of guppies.

There’s lots of crazy stuff happening in language.

It’s happening in your home.

It’s happening where you work.

It’s happening in the books you read and stuff you read on the Internet.

Share it with us.

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