NHL Team Names Part 3

Continuing our posts on the many NHL teams and their name origins.

The name Ottawa Senators honors the old Ottawa Senators hockey team named for Canada's capital that won 6 Stanley Cups and was also the nickname for a 1901 amateur team. Their logo features an ancient Roman senator.

The Washington Capitals of Washington, D.C. use the capital of the U.S. as their name and home.

The Pittsburgh Penguins picked up their name in a contest. Penguins at least partially may have been picked for the animals association with ice and snow and because of the PENguin and PENnsylvania connection.

The Quebec Nordiques were named when they were in the WHA because they were the northernmost team in pro hockey at the time.

The St. Louis Blues owe their name to owner Sid Salamon, Jr. who took it from a famous song with that name by W.C. Handy. Their logo features a musical note.

Frequency and geography explain two team names. The San Jose Sharks is another contest selection but sharks - seven varieties of them - frequent the nearby Pacific Ocean and one part of Bay Area is known as Red Triangle due to its shark population.

The Tampa Bay Lightning are based in a place that is considered to be the lightning capital of the world.

         

The Toronto Maple Leafs were originally known as the Arenas, then renamed St. Patricks. Several factors that influenced the naming include an old Toronto team called the East Maple Leaves, but when Conn Smythe bought the Toronto St. Patricks, he renamed the team after the Maple Leaf Regiment of the First World War. But clearly, the maple leaf on the Canadian flag has to be a factor.

Another Canadian team, the Vancouver Canucks, took their name from the Canadian folk hero Johnny Canuck who was was a great logger, as well as being a skater and hockey player in his spare time. Their logo has gone through several transformations including two flying V styles. In 1997, the Canucks new logo featured a Haida-style orca breaking out of a patch of ice to form a stylized letter "C."

Rook

A rook is a piece in the strategy board game of chess.  Each player starts the game with two rooks, one on each of the corner squares on their own side of the board. Formerly the piece was called the tower, marquess and rector. The informal name of "castle" is considered incorrect, or old-fashioned. It has other names in other languages, including being called a ship, chariot, and in Bulgarian it is called the cannon.

In the origins of chess itself, the game was called Chaturanga though it was not exactly the same as modern chess. The piece we call a rook was considered to be a chariot rather than a castle, probably because of the speed with which it moves. The Sanskrit word for chariot was "ratha." However as the game came to Europe the word got confused with the Italian word rocca meaning a tower.

A rook is also a Eurasian crow with black plumage and a bare face that nests in colonies in treetops. The rook's scientific name is Corvus frugilegus from Latin with Corvus meaning "raven", and frugilegus for "fruit-gathering", from earlier frux, frugis, "fruit", and legere, "to pick." The English name is derived from the bird's harsh call.

As a verb, rook can mean to defraud, overcharge, or swindle someone. A bad deal, or a rip-off is sometimes called a rook. The origin of this usage is not clear at all.

Rookeries are bird nesting or breeding places and the word was later used to describe overcrowded or dilapidated tenement housing or other group of rundown dwellings. It is possible that this later usage led to the idea of "getting rooked" coming from the idea of people living in these conditions either being swindled or overcharged, or that they were the type of people who would swindle others.

Interestingly, another bird connection is the verb to fleece which also means to swindle. A victim of being fleeced can be considered a "pigeon" and the people who prey on these pigeons are called rooks and both groups may well live in one of those rookeries.

Young rookies, whether birds or people, are novices without training, who are more likely to be tricked, duped, fleeced or rooked.

In Britain, a rook is also a type of firecracker that is used by farmers to scare birds of the same name.

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Rook is also a trick-taking card game, usually played with a specialized deck of cards. Play of a hand centers on a series of finite rounds or units of play, called tricks, which are each evaluated to determine a winner or taker of that trick.

The cards for this game are sometimes called Christian or missionary cards. The card decks were introduced by Parker Brothers in 1906 to provide an alternative to standard playing cards for Puritan or Mennonite members who considered the standard face cards inappropriate. That's because playing cards were associated with gambling and fortune-telling.

Reddit

Reddit is a website that allows members to submit links to online content, which is then voted up or down to decide which submissions are most worthy of being read by everyone else.

The site was started in 2004 by then-college students Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. The name Reddit is just a play on the phrase “read it,” as in, “I read it online.”

Members of the site are known as “redditors."

Members of the site have pointed out that serendipitously there is a Latin parallel to the site's name. Reddit is the third-person singular present active indicative of reddō. The Latin “reddit” can be loosely translated as “render” which can mean “to submit for consideration or approval,” which is what people do on the site.