On the 17th of March 1979, Stephanie Clifford was born in In Baton Rouge, Louisiana.  After becoming the President of the 4H club and the editor of her high school newspaper, Stephanie was successfully completed the ACT tests and earned scores high enough for her to enter college.  Instead, she decided to take a different path.  Inspired by the name which the bassist of the band Mötley Crüe’s gave his child, “Storm”, she changed her name her name to Stormy Waters and began her career as a stripper in a local club.  Sometime later, when she began a career as an actress, writer, and director in the pornography industry she became inspired once again by the American whiskey Jack Daniels and changed her pseudonym again—but this time to Stormy Daniels.

According to research compiled by Quartz from the toponymy reference book Oxford Concise Dictionary of World Place-Names, basically every country on Earth is named after one of four things (though many origins are understandably murky). Do you know which category your country falls under? We’ll give you the first two categories to get you started.

Feature of the Land
About a quarter of the world’s countries got their names from some description of the land.

• Iceland was originally called Snæland, “Snow Land,” but its current name comes from Norse settlers who renamed it to deter visitors.
• Grenada was named by Spanish sailors who thought the landscape resembled the region around Granada in Spain.

A Directional Description
A slight twist on the previous category, this one is more geographically specific. According to Quartz, about 25 countries are named for their location.

• Australia comes from the Greek name Terra Australis Incognita, meaning “unknown southern land,” as a result of the Greeks imagining some faraway place in the southern hemisphere.
• Ireland comes from Iar-en-land, “land in the west,” from the Gaelic word iar, meaning “west.”

 

The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico announced this month that the Sherman Alexie Scholarship has been officially renamed to the MFA Alumni Scholarship.  The decision to change the name came in reaction to the charges of sexual harassment by the author.  On the 28th of February 2018, the writer released a formal statement in which he admitted to having “done things that have harmed other people […].”  The statement ended: “I am genuinely sorry.”  The scholarship was first introduced in 2017.

The date has been set.  Almost 3,000 people have been asked to mark the date on the calendar and RSVP for the wedding between His Royal Highness The Prince of Wales and Ms. Meghan Markle. The problem is…the bride-to-be’s name has been misprinted.  The official name of the next member of the Royal Family is actually Rachel Meghan Markle.  In a world where titles and names mean so much, the fact that the wedding invitations do not include the bride’s full name is being considered by many Royal observers to be a major gaffe, especially considering the fact that the Queen used the bride’s full name in her formal written consent for the marriage.  And to make matters curiouser and  curiouser, the wedding invitation also significantly shortened the Royal groom’s full list of personal names (i.e., Henry Charles Albert David). Supporters of the Royal Family have interpreted these onomastic changes as a welcome sign of the new, relaxed, and easy manner of the newlyweds-to be.

Snake Serum and Dragon’s Blood – not names you’d first associate with a high-end skincare range. When Maria Hatzistefanis decided after several years in business to give her beauty products more eye-catching names she knew it might be risky. It worked, though. Not only did the names create a talking point, they led to the products flying off the shelves. Hatzistefanis, 47, says a key ingredient used in her products, syn-ake peptide, replicates the reaction to a snake bite, resulting in a mild freeze-like effect in facial muscles. “One day, I brainstormed with my team and, as one of the ingredients mimicked the effect of snake venom I said, ‘let’s go crazy and see what happens’.

Click through to this article at the BBC News to read more about Hatzistefanis’ company, Rodial, and how it’s become so successful. 

The language of place names creates a striking snapshot of New Zealand’s history. A new map, created by researchers at Te Punaha Matatini (a centre of research hosted by the University of Auckland) as well as Dragonfly Data Science, shows how Maori and English names are distributed on the North and South islands. The interactive map on the NZ Herald website is coloured based on whether the place name contains Māori or English. 

Kaitaia’s Te Hiku Media is running a project that aims to teach computers to speak and understand Te Reo Māori. They are developing tools to understand both written and spoken Te Reo. The development of an acoustic model for Te Reo Māori is being crowd-sourced. To build a reference of spoken Te Reo Te Hiku Media is asking Māori speakers use the website koreromaori.com record themselves reading as little as ten sentences a day for a month.