The Staples Center in Los Angeles, home to the Los Angeles Lakers Basketball team, will be renamed the Crypto.com Arena. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, Crypto.com reached a 20-year deal with the owners of the arena for the naming rights of the landmark stadium in Los Angeles. The website “Crypto.com” manages and trades cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
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Publication announcement: Names: A Journal of Onomastics 69, no. 4 is now available
The latest issue of Names: A Journal of Onomastics is now available online! Click here to read the latest in onomastics scholarship in volume 69, number 4 of Names. A table of contents appears below.
Volume 69 marks the first year that Names is published as an open access journal available to all via the Journal’s new home at the University of Pittsburgh. All journal content, including the content found in previous volumes, is now available for free online as downloadable PDF files.
Subscribers to the print version of the journal will receive their copies within the next few weeks.
Table of Contents
Articles
“Corn Belt as an Enterprise-Naming Custom in the United States” by Michael D. Sublett
“Snack Names In China: Patterns, Types, and Preferences” by Dan Zhao
“How Three Different Translators of The Holy Qur’an Render Anthroponyms from Arabic into English: Expanding Vermes’s (2003) Model of Translation Strategies” by Mahmoud Afrouz
“A Revised Typology of Place-Naming” by David Blair and Jan Tent
Book Reviews
“The Life of Guy: Guy Fawkes, the Gunpowder Plot, and the Unlikely History of an Indispensable Word” by Dorothy Dodge Robbins
“Rhetorics of Names and Naming” by Maggie Scott
Report
“2020 Award for Best Article in NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics” by I. M. Nick
Cleveland Guardians Roller Derby Team Sues Cleveland Guardians MLB Team
New Cleveland Guardians Logo
In order to prevent the renaming of the “Cleveland Guardians” Major League Baseball team, the Cleveland Guardians Roller Derby team has taken to the courts. The roller derby team—established in 2013—rejected an earlier offer from the MLB team that would allow the former “Cleveland Indians” to use the name “Guardians”.
Read more about the name change, lawsuit, and the lengths that the baseball team went to register their trademark in the Chicago Tribune.
A Fight Over the Name “Prosecco”
A glass of Prosecco (Photo by HarshLight, CC-BY-2.0)
Winemakers in Italy and Croatia are ready to go to court over the name “Prosecco.” According to a recent story on NPR, the Croatian name “Prosek” is applied to a sweet dessert wine of the Balkan country. Makers of Prosekar claim it is over 300 years older than the Italian Prosecco, but Italian winemakers are very protective of the name “Prosecco” and worry about possible confusion that could arise between the Italian and Croatian beverages.
About Names: “Joan and Joni’s popularity almost the ‘same situation'”
A statue of Joan d’Arc near the Plaines d’Abraham of Quebec City (Photo by Jeangagnon, CC-BY-4.0)
Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his November 7th column, he looks at the history of the name Joan.
Both opera and pop fans could celebrate today.
Famed coloratura soprano Joan Sutherland (1926-2010) was born Nov. 7 in Sydney, Australia. Nine-time Grammy winner Joni Mitchell was born as Roberta Joan Anderson in Fort Macleod, Alberta, Canada, on Nov. 7, 1943.
Joan was the original English feminine form of John, brought to England by the Normans in 1066. By 1380, Joan ranked third for English girls.
When parish birth records began in the 1540s, Joan was No. 1. However, it was already going out of fashion with the upper classes, who preferred Jane. In the 1610s, Jane was No. 5 and Joan No. 6.
By the 19th century, Joan was rare. The 1850 United States census found 269,741 Janes and only 1,075 Joans out of 23 million residents. The 1851 British census found 626,280 Janes and 3,397 Joans out of almost 21 million.
In the 1890s, Joan began rising again, partly as an alternative to the already fashionable Jean, but also because of a huge upswing of interest in Joan of Arc (1412-1431), the French visionary who led armies against the English before being convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. Though the Catholic church overturned Joan’s heresy conviction in 1456, she was only beatified in 1909 and canonized a saint in 1920.
When Social Security’s yearly baby name lists start in 1880, Joan ranked 508th. In 1909, Joan was 303rd. In 1917, after Cecil B. DeMille’s film “Joan the Woman” starring Geraldine Farrar as Joan of Arc was released, it was 182nd.
Want to learn more? Read on to find out more the history of the name Joan!
Award for Best Article in Names: A Journal of Onomastics 2020
The 2020 Award Winner is:
Dr. Heiko Motschenbacher
Dr. Heiko Motschenbacher, “Corpus Linguistic Onomastics: A Plea for a Corpus-Based Investigation of Names” NAMES 68(2): 88-103.
Dr. Motschenbacher is currently an English professor at Western Norway University of Applied Sciences in Bergen, Norway. He is the founder and co-editor of the “Journal of Language and Sexuality”(with William L. Leap). Since November 2017, he has conducted research as a part of a prestigious Marie Curie Global Fellowship Award granted by the European Union.
The NAMES Editorial Board and the general membership of the American Name Society would like to express their congratulations to Dr. Motschenbacher for his outstanding achievement.
“The naming of dogs” in language: a feminist guide
Illustration by Steffispirit (CC-BY-4.0)
A recent blog post by Linguist Deborah Cameron explores the naming of dogs and humankind’s tendency to project gender-stereotypes onto non-human beings. She writes:
“Do the kinds of gendered dog-names we favour suggest that we imagine male and female dogs differently? The answer seems to be ‘yes and no’. Both lists are dominated by the same type of name, one that could also be given to a male or female child, and that suggests that the gendered connotations of human names are also projected onto dogs. For instance, flower-names like Lily and Daisy are popular choices for girls, but more or less unthinkable for boys, because the qualities they connote (e.g. beauty, delicacy and freshness) are considered feminine/unmasculine. The same rule is applied when naming dogs, though among dogs the sexes are less different in appearance, and neither sex is famous for delicacy and freshness.”
About Names: “Spencer has proven it’s a name for all ages”
Spencer Tracy (Public Domain)
Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his October 25th column, he looks at the history of the name Spencer.
Will Spencer’s team win the state championship? Fans find out Monday.
“All American,” a television drama about high school football players in Los Angeles, starts its fourth season then. Starring Daniel Ezra as Spencer James, it’s based on the life of NFL linebacker Spencer Paysinger (born 1988). Last season’s cliffhanger ended with Spencer’s team running onto the field to face Beverly Hills High.
Spencer is an English surname meaning “dispenser,” the official on a noble estate who disbursed provisions. All estates had a spencer, so it’s a common surname. Almost 140,000 Americans bore the last name Spencer in 2010, ranking it 199th.
Noble English Spencers trace their ancestry to Sir John Spencer, a wealthy livestock trader who purchased the Althorp estate in 1508.
King Henry VIII knighted him in 1519. One of his descendants married a daughter of John Churchill, the first Duke of Marlborough. The surname changed to Spencer-Churchill, and the family spawned British Prime Minister Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965).
Want to learn more? Read on to find out more the history of the name Spencer!
Call for Nominations for the 2021 Names of the Year
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:
- Personal Names: Names or nicknames of individual real people or individual animals.
- Place Names: Names or nicknames of any real geographical location, including all natural features, political subdivisions, streets, and buildings. Names of national or ethnic groups based on place names could be included here.
- Trade Names: Names of real commercial products, as well as names of both for-profit and non-profit incorporated companies and organizations, including businesses and universities.
- Artistic & Literary Names: Names of fictional persons, places, or institutions, in any written, oral, or visual medium, as well as titles of art works, books, plays, television programs, or movies. Such names are deliberately given by the creator of the work.
- E-Names: Names of persons, figures, places, products, businesses, institutions, operations, organizations, platforms, and movements that exist in the virtual world.
- Miscellaneous Names: Any name which does not fit in the above five categories, such as names created by linguistic errors, names of particular inanimate objects, names of unorganized political movements, names of languages, etc. In most cases, such items would be capitalized in everyday English orthography.
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!
Join the American Name Society!
If you enjoy reading about names, we encourage you to join the American Name Society and share your name news with us! Membership is very affordable, with yearly dues starting at $20.
Membership in the ANS allows access to a community of scholars and its communications, as well as eligibility to present your research at the ANS annual conferences and the ability to submit articles to Names: A Journal of Onomastics.
Keep apprised of the latest onomastic research by joining today!