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.

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 diagonal.

The Philadelphia hockey franchise naming came down to two choices: Flyers or Quakers. Philadelphia's first general Manager, Bud Poile, had once ran 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, 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.