©Bud Boccone 2014
What do the following names have in common: St. Bernard of Menthon, Louis Dobermann, Parson Jack Russell, and King Charles II? If you answered they are all names of famous people, you are correct. If you answered that they are all names of famous dog breeds, you are also right! There are four more AKC breeds named for real-life people, and another named for a fictional character. Can you name them?
The 2017 Award Winner is:
Jan Tent (Australian National University, Canberra), “Indigenous Toponyms in the Antipodes: A Gazetteer-based Study,” published in the special issue of Names: A Journal of Onomastics 65(4).
Committee: Michael McGoff, Kemp Williams, Dorothy Dodge Robbins
Name researchers whose work examines the morphology, semantics and lexicology of names and naming may be interested in submitting an article for the scholarly journal Lexique (Lexicon). Articles should be submitted on or before March 1, 2019 and may not exceed 50,000 characters (including spaces, figures, and tables, but excluding references. The first issue of the journal is scheduled to be published in the second half of 2019. Please see the guidelines for submissions at the Lexique website.
After years of exclusive publication of thematic issues, Lexique will begin in 2019 the publication of non-thematic issues (“varia”). The purpose of the journal is to study the lexicon, both in and of itself and as a crossroads of other linguistic fields – morphology, lexicology, lexicography, semantics, computational linguistics, etc. It is intended for language sciences researchers and practitioners, coming from various theoretical backgrounds. Lexique welcomes papers submitted in French or English.
The personal name of the legendary Civil Rights leader, Martin Luther King, has served as a source of inspiration for the naming of places, spaces, organizations, and institutions across the United States. According to a recent article appearing in National Geographic, evidence of this onomastic inspiration can also be found outside the USA. The human rights activist’s name can be seen in many different countries; the global MLK street count is upwards of a thousand, including a number of Martin Luther King streets in Germany, the country from which he got his name. The online article includes an interactive map that can show streets named for Dr. King around the world.
No comprehensive global index of the streets named for King exists, but there are more than a thousand entries for such eponymous streets in OpenStreetMap, the publicly maintained database where citizens around the world can add and edit road maps. This interactive map pairs those records with Google Street View images, where available, to provide a glimpse of the places where King’s name and legacy have become part of the landscape.
The Oxford Seminars in Cartography will be holding a special lecture entitled “Rivers and Ice: Early Modern Maps of the Far North” which will be given by Charlotta Forss (Bodleian Libraries and Stockholms Universitet). The lecture will take place on January 24, 2019. The seminar is scheduled to run from 4:30 to 6:00pm in the Weston Library Theatre on Broad Street in Oxford, England. Booking is essential – for further details, please contact: Nick Millea [nick.millea@bodleian.ox.ac.uk] The Oxford Seminars in Cartography is supported by a conglomerate of scholarly organizations such as the British Cartographic Society and the Oxford Cartographers.
Journalist Jamal Khashoggi
“Jamal Khashoggi” was chosen the Name of the Year for 2018 by the American Name Society at its annual meeting in New York City on January 4, 2019.
The winner was also chosen ANS’s Personal Name of the Year. Jamal Khashoggi was a Washington Post journalist and critic of Saudi regime who was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2. His name is associated with the increasing threats that journalists face as they pursue their craft in a political atmosphere that brands them “enemies of the people” and creators of “fake news.” It is also significant as journalists have become more accurate in pronouncing the surname (Kha-SHOWG-zhee) as the name has remained in the news.
“Paradise” was chosen as the Place Name of the Year. The California city was largely leveled in the devastating Camp Fire in November. The town got its name in the 1860s, probably because of its picturesque setting. The power of this place name lies in the startling contrast between the original beauty that this toponym was chosen to represent and the catastrophic events that came to mark this community. Within the United States, “Paradise” became common in wordplays such as “Paradise Lost”. The name demonstrates not only sociocultural relevance, but also linguistic productivity.
“Gritty” was voted Trade Name of the Year. The new mascot of the Philadelphia Flyers, a professional hockey team that had until then lacked any mascot, made its debut on September 24, and immediately provoked a variety of responses. Left-wing activists made him a socialist meme: a blue-collar monster, reclaimed from marketing creators. On October 24 the Philadelphia City Council passed a formal resolution honoring Gritty, declaring that he honored the city’s spirit and passion. The name “Gritty” also is an inside joke used as a descriptor by fans for any player who isn’t the most athletically talented.
“Wakanda” was chosen Artistic Name of the Year. The fictional African country, created in 1966 by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby for their Black Panther comic, was brought to life in the 2018 film Black Panther.
“#MeToo” was chosen as the Miscellaneous Name of the Year. Although it originated in 2017, the linguistic and cultural significance of this term has continued unabated. The once innocuous phrase of sympathy has turned into an international rallying cry for justice and survivors’ rights. It is now the name of an international activist movement for survivors of sexual assault, the title of a documentary film, and a US Congressional Act, the “Member and Employee Training and Oversight on Congress Act”.
The American Name Society is a scholarly organization founded in 1951 devoted to studying all aspects of names and naming. The Name of the Year vote has been held since 2004. “Rohingya” was the 2017 Name of the Year. “Aleppo“won for 2016 , “Caitlyn Jenner” for 2015, “Ferguson” for 2014, “Francis” for 2013, and “Sandy” for 2012.
For further information contact Dr. Cleveland Evans, chair of the Name of the Year committee, at cevans@bellevue.edu or 402-210-7458.
