2016 marks the first year anniversary of Ohio University’s historic decision to recognize the right of OU students to have their preferred name and pronoun used on official university listings such as class rosters, advising lists, and student ID cards.
Salt Lake City now has a street named after Harvey Milk, one of the first openly gay politicians to run for and win public office in US history. In 1977, the social activist was elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors. A year later, he was assassinated along with San Francisco Mayor, George Moscone. Although a few Utah residents fought against the proposed toponym, according to Stan Penfold, Utah’s first openly gay councilman, the majority of the community embraced the move to add “Harvey Milk Boulevard” to the state’s rich toponymic history.
If you enjoy reading about names, we encourage you to join the ANS and share your name news with us!… Read More
Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. This recent column explores seasonal names.… Read More
“An endonym is the name for a place, site or location in the language of the people who live there.” This world map depicts is labeled in endonyms. Take a look!… Read More
Ancestry.com recently published a map of the most popular surnames in the United States, based on their data. Despite the diversity of culture in the US, a few names dominate, for example, Johnson and Smith.
This week is your last chance to submit an abstract for the ANS 2017 Conference in Austin, TX. Abstracts are due on Thursday, June 30th. For additional information, refer to the Call for Papers.
Why do we forget names? Forgetting names is one of our memory’s most common failures – but there are ways to make them stick. Our brains don’t have a simple filing system, with separate folders for each kind of information and a folder labelled “Names”. Rather, our minds are associative. They are built out of patterns of interconnected information. When you meet someone for the first time, you learn their name. For your memory, however, it is probably an arbitrary piece of information unconnected to anything else you know and unconnected to all the other things you later learn about them.
Earlier this month, New York temporarily renamed 33rd Street to honor the late boxing legend Muhammad Ali. The new street sign was added to below “33rd Street” near Madison Square Garden.
In a landmark decision this spring, Brazilian authorities ruled that transgender and transsexual civil servants are allowed to use their newly chosen names at work. Although conservatives have complained about the decision, for now, Brazilian LGBT human rights activists are savoring their victory. This decision was passed just weeks before another historic onomastic ruling in which Bolivian officials also acknowledged the rights of adult transsexuals to legally change their names.
