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Where the Streets Have MLK’s Name

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.

Oxford Seminars in Cartography: Rivers and Ice: Early Modern Maps of the Far North, Oxford, UK, January 24 2019

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.

“Jamal Khashoggi” Chosen 2018 Name of the Year

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.

Linguistics Beyond Academia SIG Events at LSA 2019

The Linguistics Beyond Academia Special Interest Group (SIG) is pleased to announce its activities at the 2019 LSA Annual Meeting in New York City:

Panel – Friday January 4, 3:30-5 pm in Liberty 3
“Linguists in the Workplace”

This panel features linguists from an array of professions beyond the professoriate (ie., “Career Linguists”), as well as representatives from the companies who hire them. Our career linguists will tell all about their journeys from PhD to the workplace, what motivated them to make the shift to the private sector, and the advantages (and sometimes disadvantages) of working outside of academia. To give a fuller picture of what life is like for career linguists, we will also hear from those who hire linguists to better understand what make a linguist a great candidate for numerous professional roles. Panelists hail from a variety of professional sectors, including language engineering, user experience research, nonprofit/program development, and diversity technology, to name a few. An audience Q&A will follow our panel discussion. Hosted by the LSA special interest group Linguists Beyond Academia, “Linguists in the Workplace” is for anyone interested in better understanding the array of options open to linguists as they navigate their careers post-PhD.

 

Mixer – Saturday January 5, 3:30-5 pm, in Liberty 3

The idea of the mixer is to create opportunities for fostering curiosity around professional applications of linguistics for the next generation of Career Linguists. It is not a job fair or formal interviews! The goal is to provide a setting for students to ask questions and discuss life outside of academia.

There will also be a number of career panels at the LSA and ADS conferences, as well as opportunities for grad students to sign up for one-on-one career mentoring.

Please join our Facebook group for updates, news, and more!

Second Revised Preliminary Schedule for the 2019 ANS Conference in New York, NY

The American Name Society is excited to share the second revised 2019 Conference Schedule for the upcoming annual conference in New York, NY, from January 3-6th, 2019. This is a newly revised schedule and supersedes the previous version. Strikethroughs indicate that a presenter has withdrawn from the conference.

For more information about the conference and registration materials, please visit the conferences page.

Please note this schedule may be subject to minor changes.

About Names: Keith, popular in Britain, peaked in U.S. when Rolling Stones came along

Artist Keith Haring

Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his December 18th column, he looks at the history of the name Keith.

Keith’s a Scottish surname from the “lands of Keith” in the county of East Lothian. The place name may come from Pictish for “woods.” Clan Keith is an important Scottish clan. The name of its founder is unknown. He was a warrior who killed Danish leader Camus at the Battle of Barrie in 1010. King Malcolm II granted him the lands of Keith and the title “Camus Slayer.”

As a famous aristocratic surname, Keith attracted use when the custom of giving surnames as first names took off in the 19th century. In Britain’s 1851 census, there were 96 Keiths in Scotland and 61 in England. The 1850 United States Census found 41 Keiths, only a quarter of Britain’s total when the two nations’ populations were about equal.

One-syllable names are now out of fashion. In 2017 Keith ranked 493rd, its lowest since 1901. Perhaps in another 40 years Keith will make parents happy again.

Want to know more? Read on to find out more about Keiths in American history!

Call for Papers: CSSN: Canadian Society for the Study of Names, Vancouver, Canada, June 1-2 2019

The Canadian Society for the Study of Names (CSSN) / Société canadienne d’onomastique (SCO) will hold its annual meeting as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Canada, June 1 – 2, 2019, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. 

This year’s conference features a special presentation by Dr. Claire Boudreau, Chief Herald of Canada, on the topic, “The Representation of Names in Contemporary Canadian Heraldry: The Making of Canting Arms and What they Tell About Names and Naming.” They especially invite papers that address the representation of names in various forms or media, but we welcome presentations on any onomastic topic. Papers may be presented in either French or English. For further information, please see the full call for papers on the SCCN website.

 
 

Call for Papers: LxGr2019, Ormskirk, UK, June 22 2019

A symposium on lexis and grammar is scheduled to take placed on Saturday, June 22, 2019 at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk (UK).  Entitled Corpus Approaches to Lexicogrammar (LxGr2019), the focus of this event is Halliday’s view of lexis and grammar as ”complementary perspectives”.  LxGr is particularly interested in paper proposals that focus, for example, discuss different interpretations of the nature of lexicogrammar; operate within any theoretical approach that takes into account the interaction of lexis and grammar (e.g. Construction Grammar, LexicalGrammar, Pattern Grammar, Systemic Functional Grammar, Valency Grammar). 

If you would like to present, send an abstract of 500 words (excluding references) to Costas Gabrielatos (gabrielc@edgehill.ac.uk). Please make sure that the abstract clearly specifies the research questions or hypotheses, the corpus and methodology, the theoretical orientation, and the main findings.

The call for papers can be found here. The deadline for abstract submission is 17 February 2019.

Call for Papers: Conference on Lexicography in the Nordic Region, June 4-7 2019, Helsing­fors, Fin­land

From the 4th to the 7th of June 2019, Helsinki, Finland will be the site of a scientific conference on lexicography, “15 konferensen om lexikografi i Norden”. The primary languages of the conference are Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The deadline for submission of abstracts for 20-minute scientific presentations is December 31, 2018.  For more on this event, please consult the official conference website.

The conference is organized by the Institute for native languages, in cooperation with the University of Helsinki and the Nordic Association for Lexiography. The theme is: Dictionaries – by who, for whom and why? Other submissions on lexicography in theory and practice are welcome. The posts can be in the form of lectures or posts  Three plenary speakers have been invited: Anna Helga Hannesdóttir, Iztok Kosem and Nina Martola.