More Hockey Team Name Origins

This post continues earlier ones on the origins of some hockey team names.

The Toronto Maple Leafs have several possible reasons for choosing their name. The owner at the time, Conn Smythe, may have been inspired by an old Toronto team called the East Maple Leaves.

Also, when Smythe bought the Toronto St. Patricks, he may have been honoring the Maple Leaf Regiment of the First World War. (That original team was known as the Arenas, then renamed St. Patricks, supposedly to attract an Irish following.)
Though, quite obviously, the name immediately clearly suggests the maple leaf on the Canadian flag.

The Vancouver Canucks take their name from a Canadian folk hero.

The legend says that Johnny Canuck was a great logger, and was a skater and a hockey player in his spare time. Johnny Canuck was actually a Canadian cartoon hero and superhero who was created as a political cartoon in 1869 and was later re-invented, most notably as a Second World War action hero in 1942.

The Vancouver Canucks hockey team current logo is an orca whale, but since 2008 they have also used a lumberjack rendition of Johnny Canuck as one of their team logos.


The Washington Capitals joined the National Hockey League as an expansion team for the 1974–75 season. The team was owned by Abe Pollin (also then owner of the NBA's Washington Bullets) and he had built the Capital Centre in suburban Landover, Maryland, to house both the Bullets (who formerly played in Baltimore) and the Capitals.

The Washington Capitals have a very obvious team name being that they represent Washington, D.C., the Capital of the United States.

The San Jose Sharks, as with many sports teams, held a contest to select a team name. Out of 5,000 entries, the judges picked Sharks.

That's not a bad choice considering that there are seven varieties of sharks in the nearby Pacific Ocean. There are several shark research facilities in that area and one part of Bay Area is known as The Red Triangle due to its shark population.

I didn't know this before but Tampa Bay is the lightning capital of the world. Therefore, the Tampa Bay Lightning makes perfect sense as a team name which is also associated with power, danger and speed.

Hockey Team Name Origins

As it gets more wintry in my part of the U.S., thoughts turn to hockey. Hockey team names seem to pretty straightforward in their origins.




The Ottawa Senators honors an old Ottawa Senators hockey team that won 6 Stanley Cups. Originally: as Canada's capital, the nickname for 1901 amateur team.

The Philadelphia Quakers had been that city's first NHL team briefly in 1930-31. The name reflected the heritage of the area's original settlers, but people felt that the name "Quakers" was jinxed because that original team had the second worst record in NHL history (4-36-4).

For a new team, the name choices were narrowed down to the Flyers or the Quakers. Philadelphia's first general manager, Bud Poile, once ran a pro team in Edmonton called the Flyers, so that was the pick.

The Phoenix Coyotes started as the Winnipeg Jets in the WHA. Then owner Ben Hatskin asked his pal Sonny Werblin (then owner of the National Football League's New York Jets) for permission to use the name.

The Jets' first signing was Norm Beaudin ("the Original Jet") and the teams first major signing was Bobby Hull ("The Golden Jet"). Hull's acquisition, partially financed by the rest of the WHA's teams, was widely seen as giving legitimacy to the WHA as a serious rival major league to the NHL.

The Jets were further noteworthy in hockey history for being the first North American club to seriously explore Europe as a source of hockey talent.


After moving to Phoenix for the 1996-1997 season, the team name changed to reflect an animal that is well known in the southwest region of the U.S.

The new logo depicts a Kachina-style coyote standing upright with a hockey stick. The head of the coyote features a mask drawn in the Southwestern style. The Phoenix Coyotes team colors are of a Southwestern flavor, and include forest green, brick red, sand, sienna, and purple.

 
For the Pittsburgh Penguins, the management held a contest and chose Penguins, partly because the animal is associated with the ice and cold and supposedly partly because the team is in PENnsylvania.

Quebec Nordiques - Committee named them Nordiques (then in the WHA) because they were the northernmost team in pro hockey at 52 degrees North, 72 degrees West.


The St. Louis Blues early owner, Sid Salamon, Jr., took his inspiration for the name from the famous song by W.C. Handy.

Cancer

This blog occasionally looks at the origins of just words - as opposed to bands, products, teams and other categories.

This particular one was inspired by life circumstance and the synchronicity of hearing a segment called "Science Diction" on the NPR program Science Friday with Howard Markel, a physician, medical educator, and historian of medicine at the University of Michigan.

It turns out that the word cancer is a word we have known and feared for a long time. It's one of those words we sometimes fear to say aloud. We use aphorisms like the "C-word" as if saying the word might make us susceptible to it.

It not so different from saying that someone "passed" rather than saying they died. But, people get cancer and people die.

We may not think of cancer as a disease existing in the time of the ancient Greeks, but breast, uterine, mouth, skin, stomach and rectal cancers were all described by Hippocates and others.

Hippocrates (back around 400 B.C.) supposedly named the disease karkinos [from the Greek, for crab]. We're most familiar with this reference from the zodiac sign Cancer, the crab.

It seems an odd choice for the disease. We're not completely sure about Hippocrates choice, but several origins have been put forth.

One is that Hippocrates saw when examining patients with malignant cancer large masses, he might have seen the hardness of these tumors to be like the protective shell of a crab.

Another explanation is that the pain of a tumor is sometimes described as like the sharp pinching of a crab’s claw which also bites and doesn't let go.

If we move ahead to the anatomist Galen of Pergamon (131-201, A.D.), he took Hippocrates' choice deeper when he dissected breast cancer tumors and described them as looking "just like a crab’s legs extended outward from every part of its body."

The Cult

 

I have mentioned before that the original incarnation of this site is still online, but it's "locked" to editing and out of date. Unfortunately, the email address on it still works, so I get a good amount of mail with complaints about omissions and errors.

One of the top complaints is about what I had written about The Cult. I mistakenly said that The Cult started as the Sudden Death Cult. The band must have a pretty good cult following still because people are always complaining about the goof.

Let me set the record straight here.

The Cult are a British rock band, formed in 1983. They gained a dedicated following in Britain in the mid 1980s as a post-punk band with singles such as "She Sells Sanctuary."

They went more mainstream, especially in the United States, in the late 1980s as more of a hard rock band with singles such as "Love Removal Machine".

They have been described as a fusion of "heavy metal revivalist sound with the pseudo-mysticism of The Doors and the guitar-orchestrations of Led Zeppelin while adding touches of post-punk goth rock". That's quite a mix.

There have been varying lineups since 1981 with the longest serving members being vocalist Ian Astbury and guitarist Billy Duffy.

Formed in 1981in Bradford, Yorkshire by vocalist/songwriter Astbury, he named it Southern Death Cult. The name comes a 14th century Native American religion, the Southeastern Ceremonial Complex (or Southern Death Cult) which existed near the Mississippi delta area.

The connection can be heard on songs like "Horse Nation" which shows Astbury's interest in Native American issues. The lyrics include "See them prancing, they come neighing, to a horse nation" which is taken almost verbatim from the book Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. The song "Spiritwalker" deals with shamanism and was influenced by his reading of Australian Aboriginal beliefs.

In April 1983, Astbury teamed up with guitarist Billy Duffy and formed the band "Death Cult". Duffy had previously been in The Nosebleeds (along with Morrissey), Lonesome No More and then Theatre of Hate.

They softened the Gothic connotations of the name by shortening it to "The Cult" in January 1984 before appearing on the (UK) television show, The Tube.

They released the album Love in 1985, which charted at #4 in the United Kingdom, and which included singles such as "She Sells Sanctuary" and "(Here Comes the) Rain".

The harder rock sound came with their third album, Electric and their fourth album, Sonic Temple, which were their North American "breakthrough" albums.

In the early 90s, the band was coming apart (alcohol abuse, off-stage tensions etc.) and they split in 1995.

Four years later, they reunited and recorded the album Beyond Good and Evil (which took its name directly from a book by Friedrich Nietzsche).

All of their albums were reissued in Asia and Eastern Europe in 2003 and Japan in 2004. In 2006, the band did a series of world tours.

Their last release was Born into This


There is a compilation of early recordings under the name Southern Death Cult.



Here is a Wikipedia entry on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_Death_Cult and some information on the Native American connection.

OTHER ALBUMS 

Steel Box Collection: Greatest Hits

Of Sonic Temple

B.O. Rare Cult

The Cult - Pure Cult - DVD Anthology 1984-1995