this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2025
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Science Memes

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Chat, is this true? (mander.xyz)
submitted 22 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 10 points 21 hours ago (9 children)

@[email protected] - Do you know? I couldn't find many sources but I only speak English.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 20 hours ago* (last edited 4 hours ago) (8 children)

EDIT: As indepndnt mentioned in a comment below, the OP was posted on February 14, which pre-dates the wikipedia edits. So, my conclusions below about the timeline are not valid.

Hah, sure, let's investigate 🕵️‍♂️

The term 'Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl' was added as a potential Aztec name to the English wikipedia page on February 15, 2025, by user 'Mxn'.

The description of the edit is the following:

Frum says the Aztecs had no specific name for the gulf, which is plausible in a practical sense, but Fernández gives a specific religious name and is more of a reliable source on this topic

If we investigate a bit further, we can see that the term Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl is described to be a name for the 'Gulf of Mexico' in the spanish Wikipedia: https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl

This page was updated to include the description of Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl as the 'Gulf of Mexico' in September 16, 2018. I don't have access to the citation so I don't know if the citation specifies if this term is still known/used.

If you check the history you will find that the same 'Mxn' fixed a typo in this page on February 15, 2025.

So, from this sequence of events it is highly likely that the term 'Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl' was included into the Gulf of Mexico wiki page as a result of the user Mxn performing an active search for Aztec names for the Gulf of Mexico, and finding this connection between the term an the gulf by searching on Wikipedia. This information did not come from recent news about the term being used by natives.

I can find no evidence of native people referring to the gulf of Mexico as 'Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl' more frequently or at all. I can find no mention of this becoming viral in Mexico.

I find it highly unlikely that:

  • User Mxn added an obscure Aztec term to the Wiki page two weeks ago

AND

  • This same obscure Aztec term coincidentally began being used by Mexican natives, and this trend became popular enough to be noticed by foreign media but not by Mexican media

More likely....

  • Mxn actively looked for a term and updated the English wiki
  • Someone read the English wiki, thought this would be a nice story, made the meme

And this concludes my little investigation 🧐

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 hours ago (1 children)

The post in the screen shot is dated February 14, 2025 though?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

How did I miss that?!

My timeline is incorrect then. Since the post from sassymetischick.bsky predates the wiki edit, it is more likely that the wiki edit was made in response to this meme, and not the other way around. This pretty invalidates what I said above...

I still can't find any evidence of this being an actual trend, but I no longer have a good guess about the origin.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

Looking through the archived history of the talk page, I can confirm that the claim on the wiki page is derived from the viral post, and not the other way around: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Gulf_of_Mexico/Archive_3#Chalchiuhtlicueyecatl

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