Some "B" Band Name Origins

Here are some quick takes on some band name origins that start with the letter "B."

Some band names are very simple to explain. Such is the case with the band BON JOVI which is simply named after the New Jersey bandleader, Jon Bon Jovi - with the caveat that his real name is John Bongiovi, Jr., but the band name went with a name less likely to be mispronounced or misspelled. 

BLACK UHURU - Uhuru is Swahili for freedom, therefore "Black Freedom".

BLIND MELON's name has two origin stories. The term was slang for an out-of-work hippie type and supposedly member Shannon H's dad called him/them that. But the name also recalls a genuine old blues singer, Blind Lemon Jefferson, if you note that "Melon" is also an anagram for "Lemon."

The band BLINK 182 supposedly has no origin story or meaning but the band seems to encourage various origin stories. One such story is that the band started out as just Blink but was threatened by a lawsuit from an Irish band with the same name. They added the 182 and chose the number because that how many times the f-word is said in one of the member's favorite movies.

THE BLOODHOUND GANG - was a segment on the PBS kid's show 3-2-1 Contact! in the 1980's. In the show, three kids are amateur detectives, solving mysteries and fighting crime.

If the band BLOTTO's website is to be believed, the band started as the Star Spangled Washboard Band. They were a bluegrass band that did some novelty songs in their show. They had some hits including "I Get a Charge Out of You" and the medley "The Battle of New Orleans / Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor" toured and appeared in TV talk shows. 

When they disbanded, four members kept at it, added a bass player, a drummer and a female vocalist, and renamed their band Blotto. They say the name comes from the dog in the 1930's novel Nightlife of the Gods but "blotto" is also popular slang for being totally drunk.

BOOKER T. & THE M.G.'S seems like a logical name for this

Booker T. is the keyboardist and bandleader. I originally though the M.G. cmae from the once-polar sports car but it actually stands for "Memphis Group" which tells you something about the bands's origin.

Their 1962 hit, "Green Onions," has appeared in many TV shows and movies and still gets classic radio airplay.

Meliorism

I discovered "meliorism" via Merriam-Webster's Word of the Day podcast. It's a word that I think we need right now as we are in the second half of what may well be a full pandemic year.

Meliorism (MEE-lee-uh-riz-um) is the belief that the world tends to improve and that humans can aid its betterment. 

It is not pessimism and not optimism but some place in between though closer to the optimistic side.

"An old truism holds that the pessimist sees the glass as half-empty 

while the optimist sees it as half-full. But active and engaged people 

don't bother to measure the contents of their cups. They savor what they've got, 

drink it down, then go looking for a refill. One name for this approach is meliorism. 

Meliorists want to make things better—to ameliorate them."

 — Andrew Fiala, The Fresno (California) Bee, 10 Nov. 2017 

Somehow I missed this word, though it's not new. British novelist George Eliot believed she had coined meliorist back in 1877 when she wrote, "I don't know that I ever heard anybody use the word 'meliorist' except myself." But the podcast sais that there is evidence that meliorist had been around decades before Ms. Eliot used it.

It probably comes from the Latin melior, meaning "better" with a nod the English melior descendant, meliorate, a synonym of ameliorate which means "to make better or more tolerable" which was introduced to English in the 1500s.

Meliorism is a word for 2021 when I would love to believe that the world will improve and that we can aid its betterment. 

First Known Use of a Word

In researching words and names for this site, I am often looking for the first known use of a word in English. I recently found an interesting online tool called Time Traveler that allows you to enter a year and see the words first recorded in that year. The site is part of Merriam-Webster.com so these results are based on their dictionaries.

I took a look at words from 1953 and was surprised that some words only appeared that year and that some came that early in history. The list is a kind of lens on what was happening in that year.

Here are a few words that had their first known use in 1953.

• ballpoint pen
• bench press
• blacklight 
• cherry bomb
• flea collar main manmalathion
• male-pattern baldness
• Medicare
• random-access memory
• real-time
• rebar
• RSVP
• saber saw 
• stiletto heels
• sunblock
• trans-fatty acid
• UFO
• videotape and videotape recorder
• wax museum
• whoopee cushion

With each word or phrase, you can look at the origin. For example, with "UFO" you find:
UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECT
"All right." The President sighed. "Is there anybody around this table who thinks UFOs and this signal from Vega have anything to do with each other?"  — Carl Sagan
In 1966, the first UFO "abduction" was described in journalist John G. Fuller's book The Interrupted Journey.  — Keay Davidson

First Known Use of UFO, 1953, in the meaning defined above

The site cautions that the date may not represent the very oldest sense of the word. 

Many obsolete, archaic, and uncommon senses have been excluded from this dictionary, and such senses have not been taken into consideration in determining the date.

The date most often does not mark the very first time that the word was used in English. Many words were in spoken use for decades or even longer before they passed into the written language. The date is for the earliest written or printed use that the editors have been able to discover.

These dates also change as evidence of still earlier use emerges.

The First Known Use Date will appear in one of three rounded off styles:
For the Old English period (700-1099), "before 12th century"
For the Middle English period (1100-1499), by century (e.g., "14th century")
For the Modern English period (1500-present), by year (for example, "1942")

Nyctophiles and Night

Night image from Pixabay

I came across the word nyctophile and had to look it up. Nyctophile (noun) is a person who has a special love for night and darkness. I think I am one of those people.

This word has Greek origins – nyktos literally means night and‎ philos stands for love. We have a lot of words using phile from phileein meaning to love or to show a love of something. Bibliophiles love books. Cinephiles love the cinema. Astrophiles love astronomy and the stars. I am all of those things.

I do like (love?) nighttime and I am more active at night (nocturnal? not really). But I started to wonder what the actual difference is (if there actually is a difference) between words like night, dusk, evening, nightfall, twilight, eventide, and sundown. When is it officially "night"?

Dusk, evening and twilight are commonly used interchangeably to mean the period from sunset/sundown until nighttime. But I've also seen nightfall, eventide used for that period. I don't think anyone would correct you if at sundown you said "I love the light at dusk." 

Looking up these terms it seems that "dusk" is a period of time occurring at the end of the day during which the sunsets. "Evening" is the time of the day between dusk and night, when it gets dark. Dusk occurs when the geometric center of the Sun is 18° below the horizon in the evening.

In the 48 contiguous U.S. states, it takes anywhere from 70 to 100 minutes for it to get dark after sunset and the further north you are, the longer it takes for true darkness to arrive after sundown.

What about twilight? That is the time between daylight and darkness and seems to be applied to the time after sunset and also before sunrise when the light appears diffused and often pinkish. The sun is below the horizon, but its rays are still scattering because of the Earth's atmosphere to create the colors. So, there are two twilights - the periods between the dawn and sunrise, and the time between sunset and dusk.

Is that clear or more confusing? By the way, sunrise and sunset are defined as the exact times when the upper edge of the disc of the Sun is at the horizon. That's an easy one to identify.

Name Changing: Washington Redskins and Kansas City Chiefs

 
July 23, 2020

Effective immediately, Washington will call itself the “Washington Football Team”, pending adoption of a new name. This is not a final renaming and rebranding for team; this is the name it wants to use until pending adoption of a new name in the future.

July 14, 2020: This week the Washington Redskins announced that they would be retiring their nickname and logo after completing a thorough review that began on July 3.

An earlier post here about how team names change as the team moves from city to city ended with a mention of the football Washington Redskins. Their name and logo have been controversial for a long time and particularly in the past few years there has been greater public outcry to change them. 

The logo that was controversial and that has been retired

The Washington Redskins name controversy involves the name and the logo of the team. Native American individuals, tribes, and organizations have been questioning the use of the name and image for decades. Over 115 professional organizations representing civil rights, educational, athletic, and scientific experts have published resolutions or policies that state that the use of Native American names and/or symbols by non-native sports teams is a harmful form of ethnic stereotyping that promotes misunderstanding and prejudice which contributes to other problems faced by Native Americans.

The Washington Redskins team is only one example of the larger controversy, but it receives the most public attention due to the name itself being defined as derogatory or insulting in modern dictionaries and the prominence of the team representing the nation's capital.

a "less controversial" script logo used by the Redskins (1972–2019) Sportslogos.net, Public Domain

When an NFL franchise was bought for Boston in 1933, the team was set to play at the home of the baseball Boston Braves so it adopted the same name. The following year, the Braves moved to Fenway Park and changed their name to the Redskins. The Redskins name traveled with the team to become the Washington Redskins. Of course, the baseball Atlanta Braves, also use American Indian imagery - and a pretty tasteless "chop" motion in the stands by fans.

It is just a matter of time before the same pressure is put to bear on other teams, such as the NFL's  Kansas City Chiefs who also use Native American imagery in its logo of an Indian arrowhead. 

The team was supposedly named in honor of Kansas City mayor Harold Roe Bartle who was instrumental in bringing the AFL Dallas Texans to Kansas City, MO in 1963. Bartel earned his nickname as the founder of a Boy Scouts honor camping society Tribe of Mic-O-Say in which he was "Chief" Lone Bear. But their logo doesn't seem to represent that origin story.

In 1989 the Chiefs switched from Warpaint, a Pinto horse ridden by a man in a feathered headdress, to their current mascot K. C. Wolf. A horse named Warpaint returned in 2009 but is ridden by a cheerleader.

John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band

JOHN CAFFERTY and the BEAVER BROWN BAND are best remembered for their soundtrack to the movie Eddie and the Cruisers. 

,

The band was from the Cranston Rhode Island area in the early 1970s. They were doing the garage band practice when someone saw a Dutch Boy paint can that was called Beaver Brown and that became the original name of the band.  Lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist John Cafferty's name was added to the band's name for their first album's release. 

Before the hit soundtrack made them famous, they had some early success in 1980 with a self-released single that had the songs "Wild Summer Nights" and "Tender Years" - both of which would appear later on the movie soundtrack. Though it had East Coast airplay, they didn't get signed by a label.

The band was sometimes compared favorably to the sound of Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band and critics liked them but it was an offer from producer Kenny Vance to score a movie he was doing that launched their career.

The film was based on the novel of the same name by P. F. Kluge about some reporters doing a story on a fictional New Jersey bar band called Eddie and the Cruisers that was legendary locally in their time locally. 

The film was in heavy rotation on HBO in the early 1980s and the soundtrack album reached the top 10 on the Billboard chart and produced a top 10 single, "On the Dark Side." The album was eventually certified triple Platinum by the RIAA.

John Cafferty & The Beaver Brown Band continue to tour and other songs by them have been used on the soundtracks of other major motion pictures.

   =

In like a lion, out like a lamb

News about the pandemic seemed to push aside the usual stories on the news about the weather. “In like a lion, out like a lamb” has always seemed a straightforward enough proverb about the weather in March. March begins in winter, and by the end of the month, spring has begun, so it is often a mean lion at the start and a gentle lamb at the end. 

Some websites call the phrase an 18th-century expression. A 1732 citation lists it as “Comes in like a Lion, goes out like a Lamb.” Wikipedia says it originated in Pennsylvania. 

There is even a celestial explanation. In March, Leo is the rising sign but by April Aries is rising. (Ram, kid, lamb?) 

It is less frequently applied to situations where someone starts strongly and ends weakly, as in " The President came in like a lion but went out like a lamb."

Doomscrolling

Have you heard the word "doomscrolling"? Have you been doing it? It is defined as the act of scrolling on your device and reading or skimming the endless stream of bad news that hit us daily on news sites and social media. 

Image:Mote Oo Education | Pixabay

The pandemic, economic hard times, violence in the street and the Black Lives Matter protests are all important stories but seem to all be part of a doomsday scenario.

The Merriam-Webster dictionary people have recently flagged doomscrolling as one of the words it is watching for 2020 for possible inclusion into the dictionary.

The word has appeared in stories in Business Insider, and the close variation, “doomsurfing,” appeared in the New York Times.

Why are people doomscrolling if the news is so negative? It is a combination of a "fear of missing out" (FOMO), a “hurry-up-and-wait” instinct and a real desire to get information on the pandemic and other issues even if that information is incomplete, questionably accurate and depressing.

With so many sources of information at our fingertips, the temptation to doomscroll is seductive to many people.

Vaccine and vaccination

These early months of 2020 have been filled with words (coronavirus, COVID-19) and phrases (sheltering at home, social distancing) that are new or coming into wider usage. Certainly, the words vaccine and vaccination have been used for more than 200 years, but what are their origins?

Vaccine comes from the name for the cowpox virus, vaccinia, which comes from the Latin vacca meaning cow. This pox virus attacked cows. 

In 1796, the British doctor Edward Jenner gave a young patient what became known as the first “vaccinia vaccine” - a vaccine made from the cowpox virus, - in an attempt to protect him from the human form of the pox virus. These first vaccinations were crude by today's standards. Jenner took pus from the cowpox lesions on a milkmaid’s hands and introduced that fluid into a cut he made in the arm of an 8-year-old boy.

When Jenner exposed the boy to smallpox 6 weeks later (!) he did not develop the infection. He also seemed immune to subsequent exposures and lived to age 65.

A caricature by James Gillray "The Cow Pock" of Jenner vaccinating patients who feared it would make them sprout cowlike appendages - Library of Congress, Public Domain, Link

His vaccine practice was not immediately accepted. People feared the counterintuitive idea of introducing a disease into your body in order to fight disease. And the idea of using something from an animal in your body was repulsive. Jenner submitted a paper about his new procedure to the prestigious Royal Society of London, but it was rejected. The president of the Society told Jenner that it was a mistake to risk his reputation by publishing something so controversial.

Jenner published his ideas at his own expense in a short pamphlet in 1798 which was widely read and discussed. Novelist Jane Austen noted in one of her letters that she’d been at a dinner party and everyone was talking about the “Jenner pamphlet.” 

The vaccination process evolved but in that time even the idea of germs was unknown so poor sanitation and dirty needles contributed to issues from the process

Jenner used the word vaccine in his writing and his friend, Richard Dunning, used "vaccination" in 1800, but the Oxford English Dictionary credits the French for coining the term vaccine in 1800 and vaccination in 1803. There are cognates in other languages (Italian, vaccine, Portuguese, vacina, and Spanish, vacuna). 

Today, viral tissue culture methods that were developed starting in the 1950s led to the advent of the Salk (inactivated) polio vaccine and the Sabin (live attenuated oral) polio vaccine. Despite there still be a small minority of anti-vaccination critics, mass polio immunization has now eradicated the disease from many regions around the world.

Nazz

Nazz was an American rock band formed in Philadelphia in 1967 guitarist/songwriter Todd Rundgren and bassist Carson Van Osten. The drummer was Thom Mooney and the lead vocalist/keyboardist was Robert "Stewkey" Antoni. Their first gig was in 1967 opening for the Doors in 1967. 

Like the Doors, their name was just Nazz but people usually referred to them as The Nazz but it is just Nazz on their 3 albums. Their name comes from a track by The Yardbirds called "The Nazz Are Blue." That song doesn't explain the word's meaning (see lyrics below) but as far as I can find an earlier usage in 1952 was from American comedian Lord Buckley who had a monologue called "The Nazz" on one of his records. It that monologue, "Nazz" is a reference to Jesus of Nazareth. In later years, Todd Rundgren stated in an interview that they didn't know about the Lord Buckley or The Yardbirds' references. 

It turned out that another band in Phoenix, Arizona that formed around the same time also used The Nazz as their name but since the Philly band had a hit they changed their name to Alice Cooper.

Between 1968 and 1970, Nazz released three albums between 1968 - 1970 - Nazz, Nazz Nazz, and Nazz III but are best remembered for their first single "Open My Eyes" with the B side "Hello It's Me".

They actually broke up in 1969 but the third album came out the following year.

Todd Rundgren followed up with a string and continuing solo career and stints with his band Utopia. In 1972, Todd recorded a new version of "Hello It's Me" on his Something/Anything album and it reached number 5 on U.S. charts.

 

"Open Your Eyes" and the video released with it is a bit of psychedelic
with some Beatles' A Hard Day's Night as channeled through The Monkees.

The Yardbirds' "The Nazz Are Blue"

...But no matter what's done to me baby

I guess I'll always be blue

I got a hundred and fifty things

Now all I gotta find is you

I got a hundred and fifty things

Now all I gotta find is you

And if the Nazz don't help me baby

You better forget about me too

Alice Cooper

Alice Cooper   (Wikimedia)

The person we know as Alice Cooper was born Vincent Damon Furnier on February 4, 1948. But we also know Alice Cooper as a band whose stage show often included a guillotine, gallows, electric chair, fake blood, boa constrictor and butchered baby dolls.

In 1964, a sixteen-year-old Furnier wanted to enter a local Phoenix, Arizona talent show. He got some friends from his cross-country team to form a group they called The Earwigs for the show. Since they didn't know how to play any instruments at the time, they dressed up like The Beatles and lip-synced to Beatles songs. They won the talent show and were motivated to learn how to play instruments and form a real band which they called The Spiders. It featured Furnier on vocals, Glen Buxton on lead guitar, John Tatum on rhythm guitar, Dennis Dunaway on bass guitar, and John Speer on drums.

They modeled themselves on mainstream rock bands of the time - The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, and The Yardbirds. For the next year, the band performed regularly around the Phoenix area with a huge black spider's web as their backdrop, the group's first stage prop.

In 1965 they recorded their first single, "Why Don't You Love Me" (a cover of a song originally performed by The Blackwells), with Furnier learning the harmonica for that song.

In 1966 "The Spiders" graduated from high school and they had a local radio hit with "Don't Blow Your Mind," an original composition. By 1967 the band had begun to make regular road trips to Los Angeles to play shows. They soon renamed themselves The Nazz and released the single "Wonder Who's Lovin' Her Now," with B side "Lay Down And Die, Goodbye." 

In 1968 they learned that Todd Rundgren also had a band called Nazz, so they needed a new stage name. They decided the group needed some kind of stage presence or unique stage showmanship to make their mark. Furnier chose "Alice Cooper" as the band's name and eventually adopted this stage name as his own. 

Early press releases claimed that the name was agreed upon after a session with a Ouija board, during which it was revealed that Furnier was the reincarnation of a 17th-century witch named Alice Cooper. But in later interviews, Alice has said that it was just picked because it has the sound of "a sweet little girl" or an old lady.

Two other erroneous origin stories are that it came from a character in the television sitcom Mayberry R.F.D. and that Alice Cooper is the name of Betty Cooper's mother in the Archie comic strips. Neither is the origin.

More important than the name was the idea of a male playing the role of an androgynous witch, in tattered women's clothing and wearing make-up. Cooper has said the look was influenced by the film Barbarella.

"When I saw Anita Pallenberg playing the Great Tyrant in that movie in 1968, wearing long black leather gloves with switchblades coming out of them, I thought, 'That's what Alice should look like'. That, and a little bit of Emma Peel from The Avengers".

The concept of a rock villain was unique and they continued to build their stage image which was in complete contrast to the real "Alice" off stage.

They had their breakout hit in 1971 with "I'm Eighteen" followed in 1972 by the even bigger single "School's Out." and peaked with their #1 album Billion Dollar Babies in 1973.

The music evolved from garage rock to art rock, conceptual rock, rock and roll, some jazz, new wave, and helped shape the sound and look of many metal bands.

Furnier's eventually went solo and legally adopted Alice Cooper as his name. He released a 1975 concept album Welcome to My Nightmare and continued with hit albums like 1989's Poison and Along Came a Spider.

Alice Cooper, the man, has taken up acting, celebrity golf, is a restaurateur, and in 2004 started a classic rock radio show "Nights with Alice Cooper."

The original Alice Cooper group was inducted into The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.


The Best Of Alice Cooper: Mascara and Monsters
Alice Cooper's Greatest Hits
Alice Cooper Goes to Hell
Billion Dollar Babies

Gaslighting, Gaslighter

GASLIGHT film by Trailer screenshot - Gaslight 1944 Public Domain, Link

Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person (gaslighter) or a group secretly attempts to create doubt in a person so that they doubt their memory, perception, or even their sanity.

I have been hearing the term used more lately. Just this month, I saw that the Dixie Chicks have released an album and song titled Gaslighter. The reference in the song is supposed to be to gaslighting that happened in lead singer Natalie Maines' marriage/divorce.

The term originated from the 1938 play Gas Light and was popularized by the 1940 and 1944 film adaptations (both titled Gaslight).

In the play, the scheming husband slowly dims the gas lights in their home, while pretending nothing has changed, in an effort to make his wife doubt her own perceptions.

He also dims other lights and makes noises and voices that the wife hears while he denies that these things are happening. His goal is to have her evaluated and committed to a mental institution.

Gaslighters use denial, misdirection, contradiction, and misinformation to destabilize and delegitimize the victim's beliefs.

Currently, I hear the term applied to politicians who seem to be manipulating the public by using those techniques.

The term has worked its way into popular culture. Pop group Steely Dan has a song entitled "Gaslighting Abbie" on their album Two Against Nature.

Quarantine

The word quarantine has certainly increased in usage in the past two month. The word's origin contains a kind of message for many of us.

The word comes from the Italian quarantena, and means "forty days." It was used in the 14th-15th-century. It designated the period that all ships were required to be isolated before passengers and crew could go ashore during the Black Death plague epidemic.

The practice began as the trentino, a 30-day isolation period that began being used in 1377 in The Republic of Ragusa, Dalmatia (modern Dubrovnik in Croatia).

Today, we are hearing about two and three week isolation periods of "sheltering in" but perhaps a period of 40 days might be better.

Quarantine is not the same as medical isolation. The latter is when someone infected with a communicable disease is isolated from a healthy population. Quarantine may be used even with people who have not been confirmed to have a disease. 

A related term that I have not heard used (yet) is cordon sanitaire which is French for "sanitary cordon" meaning the restriction of movement of people into or out of a defined geographic area, such as a community, region, or country. Originally the term referred to an actual barrier used to stop the spread of infectious diseases.