Bing

The Bing home page varies its look with each refresh - screenshot via Wikimedia

Microsoft was developing a search engine to compete with Google and others and wanted a name that was short, memorable, and easy to spell or rather not misspell. Their previous attempts at a search engine had been called MSN Search, Windows Live Search and later Live Search.

Before settling on "Bing," they had supposedly considered "Bang.” That was rejected because if it was used as a verb (as in "Googling" something), the resulting "I Banged it" sounded inappropriately obscene.

So, they went with “Bing” which met their requirements. It also suggested the term sometimes used when someone finds something they were looking for - bingo!

I also see mentioned that when a lightbulb goes off over a cartoon character's head(a "lightbulb moment") to mean they just got a good idea, you often hear a “bing” sound effect.

In China, the Bing website is called bì yìng, which translates as “very certain to answer.” That sounds good too. Bing's detractors have erroneously suggested that it is an acronym for Bing Is Not Google.

Sports Teams Names

Besides all the jargon of sports, many names of teams have unusual origins, and many terms in sports come from names. Here are some team name origins for hockey, football and baseball.

In the National Hockey League, the Anaheim Mighty Ducks got their name from Disney CEO Michael Eisner who named the team after the hit Disney hockey movie The Mighty Ducks.

When Businessman Charles Adams wanted his new franchise to have brown and yellow team colors to match his stores, and a name equated with strength and power, he ran a contest and the winning fan entry was the Boston Bruins in the early days featuring a bear/bruin.

The Buffalo team management held a contest and chose Sabres as fitting since team officials wanted a name not being used in the pros and something other than a buffalo/bison variation.

When the Flames were located in Atlanta, the name referenced the burning of the city in the Civil War. When the team moved to Calgary, management held a contest and the fans chose to keep the Flames name. The flame could now be considered a reference to Alberta's petroleum industry.

In the National Football League, when George Halas moved his oddly-named Decatur Staleys to Chicago in 1921, the Staleys played at Wrigley Field, the home of baseball’s Cubs. Halas thought that if the baseball tenants were Cubs, then his more rugged gridiron combatants should be known as the Bears.

Paul Brown chose Bengals as the team name for Cincinnati’s 1968 AFL expansion team because there had been earlier football teams in the city called the Bengals. The oldest Bengals were members of an earlier AFL in 1937, then competed as an independent club in 1938, then played in a new AFL from 1939-41 before the AFL merged with the NFL.

The Buffalo Bills nickname refers to William F. Cody, who was known as “Buffalo Bill.” Buffalo had a football team called the Bisons, but the city’s minor league baseball and hockey teams also had the same name. The football team held a contest to select a new nickname following the 1946 season. More than 4,500 entries were submitted and Bills beat out Bullets, Nickels and Blue Devils.

           

In Major League Baseball, one team name example is the 1961 expansion version of the Washington Senators, who were obviously named for the U.S. Senate in Washington D.C.

When they moved to Arlington, Texas in 1972, they took on the totally-Texas nickname Texas Rangers, referencing the famous Texas Ranger Division, the law enforcement agency that was created by Stephen F. Austin in 1823.

The aptly named Colorado Rockies became a new franchise into the MLB in 1993. The nickname "Rockies" is, of course, a reference to the Rocky Mountains which cover much of the western half of Colorado. The name Colorado Rockies had actually already been used by a National Hockey League team from 1976-1982. When that team relocated, they became the New Jersey Devils.

            

Minor league teams had been known as the Miami Marlins for several decades, referencing the marlin, a popular sport fish of the state. There were the Miami Marlins of the International League (1956-1960) and the Miami club of the Florida State League starting in 1963, who was known as the Miami Marlins during 1963-1970 and then again in 1982-1988.

The MLB team began to play as an expansion team in the 1993 season as the Florida Marlins When the major leagues expanded to the Miami area in 1993, the old nickname was revived but called by the state name of Florida Marlins. The Marlins moved into their new ballpark, Marlins Park, in 2012 which coincided with a change in the team colors/uniforms and name to the Miami Marlins.

The Marlins are the only team to win a World Series in their first two winning seasons (1997 and 2003); in fact, they are the only team to even make the playoffs in their first two winning seasons. In those two seasons, they managed to make a surprise run to the World Series, both times as heavy underdogs. They are also the only team to never lose a postseason series.

Check out all our sports names posts.

Head Honcho

"Head honcho" is a casual or unofficial reference to a person in charge of a community or an organization.

I would have guessed that the word had a Spanish origin but it actually comes from a Japanese term. The word would be spelled the same if you translate using the English alphabet. It is a geographic region near Tokyo, but roughly translated, a honchō  referring to a person in Japan is a leader or squad leader.

I have been told that you might easily see signs in Japan that would mean honchō  and that they would probably indicate a place name with this translation meaning "main town."

The "head honcho" in your office is likely to not officially be a boss but bosses everyone else around. This informal use of honcho seems to have been brought into American English slang in the 1940s to mean "officer in charge," and was popular with U.S. soldiers during the Korean War.

In the early 1950s, Gerald Ford declined offers to run for either the Senate or the Michigan governorship, instead aiming for Speaker of the House, which he called "the ultimate achievement. To sit up there and be the head honcho of 434 other people and have the responsibility, aside from the achievement, of trying to run the greatest legislative body in the history of mankind."

Unusual Origin Stories of Patron Saints

This post originally appeared on another blog of mine, One-Page Schoolhouse.  It is about some of the unusual origin stories of some patron saints.

A patron saint is one who in Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or particular branches of Islam, is regarded as the heavenly advocate of a nation, place, craft, activity, class, clan, family or person.

Saint Drogo by TheoJunior, on Flickr

There are some very odd Saints in the long list of Saints. For example, Saint Drogo (I know the convention is to abbreviate "Saint" as St., but that also means "street" and I don't want to offend any saints, just in case) is the patron saint of unattractive people and somehow also of coffeehouses.

More amazing is that Drogo was said to be able to bilocate - to maintain his actual presence in two totally different places at the same time. Witnesses claimed seeing Drogo working in fields simultaneously, and going to Mass. If that is true, I'd make him a saint for being able to be "in two places at once" rather than for being unattractive due to an affliction. That disfiguring affliction turned him into a recluse. I can find no connection to coffee and actually found that Drogo only drank warm water during his years as a recluse.

Saint Giles was said to have lived as a hermit in the south of France in the later 7th century and stayed alive on the milk of a female deer. How do you milk deer? Anyway, not only is he the patron saint of the city of Edinburgh, but also the patron saint of breastfeeding.

Saint Balthasar is traditionally considered to be one of the biblical Magi (AKA The Three Wise Men or the Three Kings) who visited Jesus in the stable at his birth. As the King of Arabia, he brought the gift of myrrh. (Extra Trivia: Myrrh is a natural gum or resin extracted from a number of small, thorny tree species and used as a perfume, incense, and medicine.) At that time, Africa was frequently equated with Egypt. Some Romani sideshow merchants and entertainers were (mistakenly) thought to have come from Egypt (that is where the corruption of Egypt leads to GYPsies). Therefore, rather unfairly, this Egyptian king became the patron saint of playing card manufacturers.

One depiction of St. Julian murdering his parents
- from a larger panel of art by Ansano Ciampanti

My favorite unusual origin story is Saint Julian the Hospitaller.

Most of the Saints get tagged as "patrons" for a number of things. Julian is attached to clowns and circus workers, innkeepers, fiddle players, jugglers, childless people - and murderers. What a mishmash of things for a Saint.

How does a Saint get associated with murder? In this case, because he was a murderer. (Though the church would clarify this as a "repentant murderer.").

His story is a variation on the classical Oedipus Rex, which he apparently had not read or he didn't learn a lesson from it.

Julian was cursed (by a hart, just to make the story even weirder) that he would kill his parents. So that this would not come to be, he left home and traveled far away to live his life. He lives this distant life, acquires his own castle, and a wife.

But his parents are desperately searching for their lost son, and they finally found his castle. Julian was away on a hunt, but his wife (who I guess didn't know about the curse) welcomed her in-laws and honored them by putting them up in their master bedroom.

While his wife is at church, Julian comes home, finds the couple sleeping in his dark bedroom, assumes that it is his wife with another man, and kills both of them.

He fulfills the curse, but is obviously wracked with guilt. In order to get salvation, he (and his wife) build an inn for travelers, and a hospital for the poor and other charitable works. He was forgiven for his crime when he gave help to a leper who turned out to be a messenger from God who had been sent to test him.

He is the patron of hotel keepers, travelers, boatmen and murderers - at least the repentant ones.

Some Lost Words of the Winter Season

This is a topic that I am more likely to write about on this blog than any of my other blogs, but it first appeared on my Weekends in Paradelle site.

It is about words of the winter season that seem to have gotten lost over the years. An article on the quite wonderful mentalfloss.com website calls a group of words "obsolete Christmas words," but I think most of them are more winter season words. Because they are English (Modern, Middle or Old) and German, they tend to be associated with the Yule or Christmas season.

I probably won't be drinking wassail this month. That is a beverage of hot mulled cider, drunk traditionally as an integral part of wassailing, which was a Medieval Christmastide English drinking ritual intended to ensure a good cider apple harvest the following year. (I may very well down a few hard ciders though, so hopefully that will please the apple gods.) Wassail probably comes from a Germanic phrase meaning “good health" and was a greeting.

One word that is totally new to me comes from Latin. You can say that it looks ninguid outside when the landscape is snow-covered.

You all know that to hibernate means sleeping throughout the entire winter. It is something animals do - not people, though some of us seem to hibernate. But some of you probably do hiemate (which my spellcheck is not happy with) which means to spend winter somewhere.

Actually, searching online for hiernate turned up nothing, so I kind of wonder about the validity of these words. Are they so lost that even Google can't find them? For example, doesn't the term "yule-hole" seem fake or very modern? It supposedly means the hole you need to move your belt to after you’ve eaten a massive meal. And yet, going back to the 1500s, the terms belly-cheer or belly-timber was used for fine food and somewhat gluttonous eating that may occur in winter and around holiday celebrations from Thanksgiving through New Year's and into those stay-at-home days of February too.

If you give a tip when you're at the bar for your drinks, that can be called a pourboire. The word comes from French and literally means "for drink.”

Many of us give or get gift cards and money as a present. To distinguish a thing that is a gift (or present) from one that is money given in lieu of the traditional object gift, the term "present-silver" has been around since the 1500s.

Another word that is brand new to me but old is xenium. It sounds like a new drug or tech company, but it means a gift that is given to a houseguest, or a gift given by a guest to their host.

Do you know nog, a word that comes from ancient English ales but still shows up in words we use during the season, such as eggnog.

While you are celebrating, keep in mind "apolausticism," a long-lost 19th-century word derived from Greek meaning "to enjoy," that describes the total devotion to enjoying yourself.

And after you totally enjoy yourself, a word that looks and sounds just right is crapulence. The OED tells us that this 18th-century word describes “sickness or indisposition resulting from excess in drinking or eating.”