So it’s St. Patrick’s Day, and you’re sitting at your favorite Irish pub, snacking on soda bread, singing along to “Galway Bay,” sipping Bushmills and squabbling about who got more screwed at the Oscars, Colin Farrell or Kerry Condon. Suddenly there’s a break in the conversation. What is a Know-It-All to do?

Lucky for you, this is one holiday whose pot-o-gold spilleth over with misconceptions, half-truths, and plain old scientific falsehoods. We’re pretty sure people love being told when they’re wrong about stuff (it’s kind of our business model), and there’s plenty to be wrong about when it comes to St. Patrick’s Day. And also plenty we didn’t know, until we went snooping around. So arm yourself with a few of the following factoids, friends, and no conversational lull will be safe in your midst. Memorize them all, and you’ll be well-equipped to “well actually” your way through the whole weekend.

Leprechauns weren’t always associated with green. They were originally pictured wearing red.
St. Patrick’s original color, meanwhile, was blue.
Speaking of Patrick: He wasn’t even Irish. He was born sometime in the fifth century in Roman Britain, possibly in present-day Scotland, though the specific location is disputed. He was abducted by Irish pirates as a teenager and sold into slavery on his kidnappers’ home island.
If you must abbreviate St. Patrick’s name, spell it “Paddy,” not “Patty.” The latter is short for “Patricia,” while “Paddy” is short for “Patrick.” The “D” comes from the Irish spelling: Pádraig.
The language spoken in Ireland is Irish, not Gaelic. Irish is a language in the Gaelic family of languages.
This misconception isn’t helped by the fact that the word for the Irish language in Irish is “Gaelige.”
When it comes to performing miracles, there aren’t many saints who can hold a votive candle to old Pádraig. He brought sight to the blind, raised the dead, filled wells in the middle of a drought. The stone where he was baptized was used as an ancient polygraph machine: sit on the stone and tell a lie, and water would seep from its cracks. If, like me, you like to compare the Catholic saints to the superheroes of the MCU—people with supernatural abilities, wandering around performing all sorts of miraculous feats, getting in all manner of scrapes, enmeshed in a canon that’s confounding to all but the most devout—St. Patrick is basically Spider-Man. Popular, overloaded with abilities, pretty decent sense of right and wrong.
Of course, the miraculous abilities of saints is, like Spidey-sense, probably fiction. The miracle most associated with St. Patrick is the driving of snakes out of Ireland. Thing is: there were never snakes in Ireland. Another victory for the fossil record.
It’s not just Ireland: there are lots of islands with no snakes. New Zealand, Iceland, Greenland, Cape Verde, Hawai’i, to name a few. Most snake-less islands are in the polar regions, because snakes are ectothermic and don’t love the cold. Frogs are also ectothermic, but there is one frog in Ireland, according to the Herpetological Society of Ireland (a group whose very existence is, you have to admit, pretty funny). This is because most frogs’ bodies can freeze up to 70% without harming the frog. There’s even one frog—the wood frog—that freezes solid for up to 200 days at a time, and lives as far north as the Arctic Circle. Talk about a miracle.
The flipside of the “Islands without Snakes” coin is Ilha da Queimada Grande in Brazil, aka “Snake Island.” It’s called this because a viper known as the golden lancehead—one of the deadliest snakes in South America—has completely overrun the island. Population estimates range from one to five vipers for every square meter on the island. There are, unsurprisingly, no people on Snake Island. I assume the vipers will spend this weekend honoring the memory of whichever of their ancestors drove the last one from their hellish home.
Ok, back to St. Patrick’s Day: Corned beef is an Irish American thing, and wouldn’t be found in Ireland.
There’s no corn in corned beef. “Corn” comes from the German word “kurnam,” meaning “small seed.” Notice the similarity to the word “kernel.” In the beef’s case, it describes the salt kernels that cure the meat.
In Ireland, a traditional feast on St. Patrick’s Day is the Irish Fry: bacon (aka rashers), fried tomatoes, soda bread, and blood sausage. The holiday is traditionally celebrated more like Easter, as opposed to the drinking competition it’s become in the U.S. It’s only relatively recently that pubs in Ireland were even allowed to be open on St. Patrick’s Day.
Patrick isn’t the only saint from Ireland. There’s also Brigid, a magical nun who once convinced the King of Leinster to give her as much land as her cloak could cover. The cloak then grew to cover several acres, giving her more than enough land for her monastery. Which superhero is Brigid? A more devout follower of the MCU will have to let me know.

And that’s all there is to know this lovely Friday morning. Happy St. Patrick’s Day everyone!
— Editor-in-Chief Chuck (with help from host Adam, whose Irish band, The Wild Colonial Bhoys, play all weekend at various locations throughout the Twin Cities. You can also catch him every Thursday hosting trivia at McCoy’s Public House.)