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.

By Source (WP:NFCC#4), Fair use, Link

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.

NHL Team Names Part 2

This is our second post on the origin of NHL Team Names. 

The New Jersey Devils' name comes from a Jersey legend from the Pine Barrens in the southern part of the state. A witch allegedly gave birth to a demon known as "Jersey Devil" in 1735, or that it was the cursed 13th child of Mother Leeds who was jinxed by gypsies. The Jersey Devil was alleged to be a half-man, half-beast that live in the Pinelands. 

Across the Hudson River, we find two hockey teams. The New York Islanders were set to be called the Long Islanders, since Long Island was where they would compete. Original co-owner Roy Boe's wife suggested the name New York Islanders in the hope of winning over unhappy New York Ranger fans. Briefly, their logo depicted a fisherman (the Island being a big fishing location), but they returned to the original logo with the "Y" in NY in the shape of a hockey stick going through Long Island. 

The Manhattan rival team is the New York Rangers. George Lewis "Tex" Rickard was the president of Madison Square Garden and was awarded an NHL franchise for the 1926–27 season. They would compete with the now-defunct New York Americans, who had begun play at the Garden the previous season. His new team was quickly nicknamed "Tex's Rangers" and the first team crest was a horse sketched in blue carrying a cowboy waving a hockey stick. It was changed to the now familiar RANGERS in a diagonal.  

Across the Delaware River, the Philadelphia hockey franchise's naming came down to two choices: Flyers or Quakers. Philadelphia's first general Manager, Bud Poile, had once run a pro team in Edmonton called the Flyers, but the Quakers had been the city's first NHL team. It had a very brief life in 1930-31. The name references the heritage of the area's original settlers. But fans thought the old Quakers name had losing attached to it, so they went with Philadelphia Flyers.

The early version of what would become the Coyotes was the December 1971 Winnipeg Jets of the World Hockey Association (WHA). After the WHA had ceased operations, they were one of four franchises absorbed into the National Hockey League. The Jets moved to Phoenix in 1996 and were renamed the Phoenix Coyotes. The team name change came with a logo to reflect an animal well known in the southwest - a Kachina-style coyote standing upright with a hockey stick and a face mask in Southwestern style. The team colors had a Southwestern style of forest green, brick red, sand, sienna, and purple.

The NHL took ownership of the Phoenix Coyotes franchise in 2009 after owner Jerry Moyes turned it over to the league after declaring bankruptcy. It took several years to find new owners who would not move the franchise out of Metro Phoenix. The NHL completed the sale of the Coyotes in August 2013, and the following summer, the team changed its geographic name from "Phoenix" to "Arizona" and modified its logo to a simpler coyote head.

NHL Team Names 1

It's s Stanley Cup time, so let us look at some NHL team name origins. The NHL divides the 31 teams into two conferences: the Eastern Conference and the Western Conference. Each conference is split into two divisions: the Eastern Conference contains 16 teams (eight per division), while the Western Conference has 15 teams (seven in the Central Division and eight in the Pacific Division).

Founded in 1993 by The Walt Disney Company as the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim, the team's name comes from the 1992 Disney film The Mighty Ducks. Disney sold the franchise in 2005 and the name of the team was changed to the Anaheim Ducks before the 2006–07 season.

The Boston Bruins were owned by businessman Charles Adams and he wanted his new franchise to have brown and yellow team colors to match his stores. Bruins (bears) have long been used for team names and to suggest strength and power.

The Buffalo Sabres is just a name that was chosen in a contest, though the team's management did want to avoid the the buffalo and bison team names that were attached to area teams in the past.

The Calgary Flames picked up that name when the team was in Atlanta. It commemorated the burning of the city in the Civil War - which seems like an odd thing to commemorate. When the team moved to Calgary, management held a contest and the fans wanted to maintain the name. The story is that the flames now represent Alberta's petroleum industry.

The Chicago Blackhawks' original owner, Frederic McLaughlin, named the team in honor of the Black Hawk Battalion, the U.S. 86th Infantry Division, which he served with in WWI. The unit was named after a Chief Black Hawk. The name used as a single word for the hockey team and later for the Blackhawk helicopter, are examples of designating certain Native Americans as "worthy adversaries" though the name has been part of the controversy over the use of Native American names and symbols for sports teams.