The American Name Society is pleased to share the ANS Fall 2021 Newsletter. 
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Physicist and chemist Maria Skłodowska-Curie, renowned for her work in radioactivity
Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his December 5th column, he looks at the history of the name Maria.
Maria and Tony meet on screen again Friday.
Steven Spielberg’s remake of 1961’s “West Side Story” premiers Dec. 10. Based on 1957’s Broadway hit with lyrics by Stephen Sondheim (1930-2021), who died Nov. 26, it’s the story of star-crossed lovers Tony and Maria, who fall in love despite being connected to rival New York City street gangs.
Maria is the Latin form of Miryam, the Hebrew name of Moses’s sister in the Bible. The origin of Miryam is unknown. The most common guess used to be “bitter sea,” because Mara is a Hebrew name meaning “bitter.” Today “rebellious” and “wished for child” are thought possible. Some modern scholars think Miriam was based on Egyptian “mry,” “beloved.”
Whatever its origin, Maria is famous as Jesus’s mother, venerated as the “Mother of God” by Christians for two millennia. Today it’s her name in most European languages. English (Mary), French (Marie), and Irish Gaelic (Máire) are among the few where Maria isn’t the traditional name of the Virgin.
Though Orthodox Christians have named girls Maria since ancient times, in the Middle Ages Roman Catholics thought it too sacred to give to babies, as Christians outside the Spanish speaking world still think of “Jesus.” When Orthodox Princess Maria of Kiev married Duke Casimir of Poland in 1040, she was rebaptized “Dobroniega,” because Catholic Poles found calling her “Maria” offensive.
This attitude changed in Iberia and Italy by 1250. Soon so many Spanish and Portuguese girls were named Maria, they were given titles of the Virgin, such as “María de los Dolores” (“Mary of the Sorrows”) as their full name, with epithets like Dolores, Gloria “glory,” and Mercedes “mercies” becoming names themselves.
“A Day at the Met” (Photo by Sracer357, CC-BY-3.0)
Most well-known for its role as the meeting place of the Met Gala, the “Sackler Wing” of the Metropolitan Museum of Art will be renamed. According to an article in The New Yorker, the Sackler family of Purdue Pharma—best known as the maker of OxyContin, one of the primary motivating forces behind the current opioid crisis—has been engulfed in controversy surrounding the business practices of the pharmaceutical. Other museums, universities, and galleries are named for the Sacklers around the world, and many of these institutions have been waiting for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s move concerning the name of the wing.
The Canadian Society for the Study of Names / Société canadienne d’onomastique is inviting paper proposals for its 56th Annual Meeting, held virtually in conjunction with the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Canada. The theme of the 2022 Congress is “transitions,” though papers related to any topic in onomastics are welcome.
Read the Canadian Society for the Study of Names Annual Meeting Call for Papers here.
CashApp logo (Public Domain)
According to an article in The Verge, the financial services app “Square” will be renamed “Block.” Square is former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s parent company of popular services such as CashApp, TIDAL, and other financial applications. The company cited “room for further growth” as the primary reason for the name change.
The American Name Society requests nominations for the “Names of the Year for 2021”. The names selected will be ones that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States. It is not necessary, however, for a nominated name to have originated in the US. Any name can be nominated as long as it has been prominent in North American cultural discourse during the past year.
Nominations are called for in the following categories:
Winners will be chosen in each category, and then a final vote will determine the overall Name of the Year for 2021. Anyone may nominate a name. All members of the American Name Society attending the annual meeting will select the winner from among the nominees at the annual ANS meeting on January 21-23, 2022.
Advance nominations must be received before January 15, 2022. Nominations will be accepted from the floor at the annual meeting. You can also send your nominations, along with a brief rationale, by email to Deborah Walker: debwalk@gmail.com.
Thank you for your nominations!
As described in recent articles in the New York Times and CNN, the World Health Organization has decided to use the Greek letter Omicron (Ο, ο) as the name of the new variant rather than the next two letters in the Greek alphabet, Nu (Ν, ν) and Xi (Ξ, ξ). The primary reason for this deviation was to avoid confusion: the Greek letter “Nu” sounds too much like the English word “New”, and the Greek letter “Xi” is too similar to the Chinese surname Xi.
Read more over at The New York Times and CNN,
Claire Windsor, an actress who found greater success during the silent film era than all of the talkies she filmed in the 1930s
Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his November 21st column, he looks at the history of the name Claire.
On Tuesday, we learn how Claire gets through the Revolution.
“Go Tell The Bees That I Am Gone”, the ninth book in Diana Gabaldon’s “Outlander” series, will be released Nov. 23. In 1991, “Outlander” introduced readers to Claire Randall, an English nurse who time-travels from 1945 to 1743’s Scotland. In “Bees,” it’s 1779 and Claire’s married to Highlander Jamie Fraser. They’re now settlers in backwoods North Carolina, menaced by both sides in the Revolutionary War.
In 2018, “Outlander” was second to “To Kill A Mockingbird” in PBS’s “Great American Read” contest. Caitriona Balfe has played Claire in Starz’s “Outlander” series since 2014.
Claire is the French form of Clara, feminine of Latin Clarus, “clear.” Two early male saints were named Clarus. Clare first appears as an English female name around 1200. After 1300, veneration of St. Clare of Assisi (1194-1253), Italian founder of the Poor Clares nuns, made it more common.
Clare was eclipsed by Latin Clara after 1750. 1850’s United States Census found 13,349 Claras and only 90 female Clares and 74 Claires, with 58 Claires born in France or French-influenced Louisiana.
That census found 225 males named Clair, Clare, or Claire. Clare was a nickname for Clarence, and also came from surnames Clair and Clare, sometimes derived from English place names or “clayer,” a medieval term for “plasterer.”
An article on NPR details Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland’s efforts to ban the word “squaw” from use on Federal lands. Secretary Haaland identified the term as derogatory, often used “as an offensive ethnic, racial, and sexist slur, particularly for Indigenous women,” and announced that some 650 place names would need to change. Recent years have seen many private organizations and companies remove the word from their branding, including the famous Lake Tahoe ski resort formerly known by that name.
