The Daily Feather — Exonyms and Endonyms

Exonym: a name for a place or group of people that is only used outside that place or group.

It’s not often QI stumbles across a word of unknown origin. And then, there was exonym, which even has a sister word we’d never heard of. (The horror for geeks who pride themselves as bona fides in the etymology department!)

Endonym: A name used by a group or category of people to refer to themselves or their language, as opposed to a name given to them by other groups.

How, you may be asking, did we stumble across such arcane terms? Well, it started with a query to QI’s Dr. Gates: “When was the last time initial state jobless claims were UP in Alaska?” His reply: “COVID from March 2020 to March 2021. Prior to that, fleetingly in May and June 2017.” Knowing this revelation would trigger a brain quirk, today’s Feather top was to have been a brief history of the Eskimo. And there it was…“Eskimo is an exonym used to refer to two closely related Indigenous peoples: the Inuit and the Yupik of eastern Siberia and Alaska.” Eskimo is a what??

Fearing we’d find more pockets of etymological ignorance, we refrained from exploring the origin of the word “Massachusetts,” where claims are rising by the most, as in 810.9% year-over-year. We wish we could label the rise there as an aberration, but claims have been rising by triple digits since the week ended March 11th, when they were up by 125.2%. Moreover, the growth rate has been steady. How does this stack up against the nation as a whole? Let’s explore that as it might surprise you.