There is a Pokémon named Farfetch’d.
It’s not one of the really cool ones either, Farfetch’d is literally a duck holding a leek.
Bulbapedia tells me that the name is a play on the Japanese idiom it’s based on, about a duck with a spring onion being a golden opportunity. Either way, even by Pokémon’s standards, Farfetch’d is a really lazy name.
It’s also the first place I heard the word ‘far-fetched.’
Well, I mean, I later actually learnt ‘far-fetched’ and what the word means, but that dumb duck with a leek was my introduction to it. I learnt a lot of words through Pokémon, actually, words like ‘slash,’ ‘gust,’ and ‘leer.’ Those words didn’t show up in the books I was reading when I was seven or eight, but I did read them on my GameBoy while trying to be a Pokémon Master.
I think it’s fascinating the way we learn things. Like how the Star Wars Expanded Universe introduced me to the concept of xenophobia (and also how it’s bad) or Mass Effect using convergent evolution to explain away all its humanoid aliens and, in the process, offering a pretty neat lesson on evolutionary biology. And, yeah, Pokémon taught me some cool verbs.
And that’s great! Learning stuff is great! Maybe you learnt about The Seventh Seal because of Bill and Ted, maybe you were introduced to classic German cinema because of a one-off vampire joke in SpongeBob, maybe your knowledge of Norse Mythology is an amalgamation of Marvel comics, God of War, and the board game Blood Rage. Who cares! Learn something new, a new word, a new dish, a new idea. There’s no shame in not knowing something, nor is there shame from learning about it from an offbeat place, no matter how far-fetched.
Essays, Not Rants! 