How Team Names Travel: American Football

Since team franchises often are moved from one city to another, team names often move and are sometimes changed.

In 1936, Cleveland’s new AFL franchise decided to take its name from one of the top collegiate teams of the era, the Fordham Rams.

The Rams name stuck even with a move to Los Angeles in 1946. The team became the St. Louis Rams in 1995.

After more than a decade without a football team, Baltimore acquired an NFL team in 1996 when the Cleveland Browns relocated.

Owner Art Modell allowed the Browns’ name, colors and history to remain in Cleveland, so Baltimore set up focus groups and fan polls to decide on a new name. Baltimore Ravens was the winner, beating out Americans and Marauders. The name refers to the mythical bird in Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven.” Poe lived and died in Baltimore.

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.

Catsup or Ketchup?

The etymology of the word ketchup has multiple possibilities. We know that in the 17th century, the Chinese had a mixture of pickled fish and spices called (in the Amoy dialect) kôe-chiap or kê-chiap. This was far from the modern-day tomato based condiment we use, but similar in sound and use.

By the early 18th century, the Chinese table sauce had made it to the Malay states (present day Malaysia and Singapore). There, English explorers discovered it and the Indonesian-Malay word used for the sauce was kecap (pronounced "kay-chap"). It's not hard to see that evolving in English to "ketchup" spelling. American Colonists brought it with them to the New World. We find the word in the 1690 Dictionary of the Canting Crew.

The spelling of "catsup" in American English is considered "a failed attempt at Anglicization." Catsup is the dominant term in American English and Canadian English, and it is particularly prominent in some southern US states.

It was news to me that in some places catsup is considered to be tomato sauce that is used on pasta and not as the condiment.

CARE packages

What’s a care package? It's a package you send to show you care about someone. We send them to soldiers abroad and to our kids at college.

But when it is a CARE (all caps) package, you're going back to the origin of the term.

CARE packages were sent by the Cooperative for American Remittances to Europe to Americans in Europe as it was still recovering from WWII.

That organization changed its name to Cooperative for Assistance and Relief Everywhere. Their focus is not on packages but on bigger development efforts.

The term “care package” has survived in its broader sense.

Collective Nouns for Birds

You know about a herd of deer and a pack of dogs or coyotes, but what about a herd of cranes?

A list of English terms of venery (an archaic word for hunting) came about in the Late Middle Ages and these included somewhat whimsical collective names for animals.

One source of these terms was the Book of Saint Albans (or Boke of Seynt Albans), a 1486 book, a compilation of matters relating to the interests of the time of a gentleman. It was the last of eight books printed by the St Albans Press in England, and it is also known by the more accurate name, The Book of Hawking, Hunting, and Blasing of Arms. It contains three essays, on hawking, hunting, and heraldry.

Although originally considered whimsical and humorous, many of these terms for have become part of the modern-day lexicon and some common collective terms (such as herd and flock) for some animals.

Many of the collective nouns for birds are the most poetic.

• gulp of cormorants
• covert of coots 
• murder of crows
• cast, cauldron, or kettle of birds of prey, such as hawks and falcons
• chain of bobolinks
• wake of buzzards
• banditry of chickadees
• convocation, congregation of eagles
• charm of finches
• glittering, shimmer, tune, bouquet, hover of hummingbirds
• party, scold of jays
• bevy, exaltation, ascension of larks

a wake of buzzards

Dracula and Vampires

Dracula is an 1897 Gothic horror novel by Irish author Bram Stoker.

Although more people probably know the character from the many movie versions, the character of the vampire Count Dracula in the novel is the fictional origin story.

Stoker did not invent the idea of a vampire, but he certainly set the modern form of it.

His novel tells the story of vampire Count Dracula's move from Transylvania to England in search of new blood and to spread the curse of the undead curse. He is opposed by those who follow Professor Abraham Van Helsing.

The first appearance of the English word vampire (as vampyre) in English was a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen published in 1745, but vampires had already appeared in French and German literature.

Austria gained control of northern Serbia and Oltenia in 1718 and officials noted the local practice of exhuming bodies and "killing vampires."

The English term was probably derived via French vampyre) from the German Vampir, in turn from the Serbian vampir.

Stoker’s vampire was based on Vlad the Impaler (Vlad Tepes), a Romanian prince who had a thing for impaling his enemies. His father, Vlad II, was known as Dracul, meaning dragon or devil, because of he was a member of a  group of knights called The Order of the Dragon.

Prince Vlad was born in 1431 into a noble family of Transylvania, a place that was between the two empires of the Ottoman Turks and the Austrian Hapsburgs. Vlad "Dracula" (diminutive of Dracul)
was imprisoned by the Turks and later by the Hungarians.

Theirs is not a happy family story.  Dracula's father was murdered. His older brother, Mircea, was blinded with red-hot iron stakes and buried alive.

As Vlad the Impaler, Dracula's preferred method of torture for prisoners was to impale them and leave them to writhe in agony.

In battle, supposedly one Turkish advance was halted because they couldn't get past the smell from decaying impaled corpses.

Stories of his actions became legend. Though it was never claimed that he was a vampire Did he eat his meals surrounded by hundreds of impaled victims? Did he eat bread dipped in blood?

He was killed in December 1476 fighting the Turks near Bucharest, Romania. He was buried at the Snagov Monastery nearby. The monastery was also used as a prison and torture chamber. When prisoners prayed before an icon of the Blessed Virgin, a trap door opened dropping them onto sharp stakes below.

Nosferatu, from the 1922 German film, directed by F. W. Murnau,
starring Max Schreck as the vampire Count Orlok
(name changed to avoid copyright issues with the Stoker estate)