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Cleveland Guardians

A fresh look from the 216. pic.twitter.com/0W8VTtZ7b0

— Cleveland Indians (@Indians) July 23, 2021

 Another team has announced that they are changing their team branding - name, logo, mascot - so that it does not offend Native American Indians.

The Cleveland Indians are playing their final season this year under that name and once the season ends they will be known as the Cleveland Guardians.

Why "Guardians?" The "Guardians of Traffic" are 43-foot statues that have stood on the Hope Memorial Bridge for almost 100 years. In a promotional video announcement (narrated by Tom Hanks) you can see the statues and beyond them is the team's Progressive Field. How do they represent Cleveland or baseball? According to the franchise, the Guardians of Traffic symbolize the spirit of progress. "We are excited to usher in the next era of the deep history of baseball in Cleveland," owner Paul Dolan said in a press release.

And why Tom Hanks? Besides him being a beloved actor and voice we trust, he has been a fan of the Cleveland baseball franchise since the late 1970's when he was a young actor interning at the Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival.

 

Oh, and that 216 reference? Check here.

Astroturfing

Astroturf is something that most people associate with the artificial grass (turf) that is often used on sports fields. But astroturfing - the verb - is something quite different. 

Astroturfing is the practice of masking the sponsors of a message or organization. It is when a message that is political, advertising, religious, or part of public relations is made to appear as though it originates from and is supported by "grassroots" participants. It is an attempt - a deceptive one - to give messages or organizations credibility by withholding information about the source's financial connection(s). 

The original AstroTurf is a brand of synthetic carpeting designed to resemble natural grass. Astroturfingplays off the "grassroots" idea that the message wants to seem "true" or "natural" rather than "fake" or "artificial."

An example of the practice came in response to the passage of tobacco control legislation in the U.S. Tobacco companies including Philip Morris, Burson-Marsteller and others created the National Smokers Alliance (NSA) in 1993 which was an aggressive public relations campaign that ran until 1999 and attempted to inflate the amount of grassroots support for smoker's rights that existed. 

In 2010, the Federal Trade Commission settled a complaint with Reverb Communications, which was using interns to post favorable product reviews in Apple's iTunes store for their clients.

Slang for Money

Slang words used to mean money have been around for a very long time and there are too many to cover in any detail here, but here are some of my favorites. 

The term that caught my attention recently that I couldn't figure out is cheddar. As slang for money, the term seemed new to me, but it is not new. At the end of WWII, welfare recipients received parcels of cheese as part of their benefits. The practice continued into the 1970s and the giving out of government surplus cheese was connected by recipients with the money they received.

Another food term is bacon. as in “bringing home the bacon.” One origin story places the phrase in the 1100s in Great Dunmow, England. According to local legend, the church in town would award a side of bacon (called a “flitch") to any man who could honestly say that he had not argued with his wife for a year and a day. Any such man would “bring home the bacon" and be considered a role model.

Another story is from the 1500s coming from country fairs and greased pig competitions. If you were the one who could catch that slippery pig, you got to keep it and so you got to “bring home the bacon."

And then some sources say it is much more modern dating back only to the early 20th century. At the time, bacon was used to refer not only to the strips we know today but to all pork, in general. The word "bacon" comes from old German and French words for “back," since the best cuts of pork come from the back and sides of the animal. 

Green as slang for money is a reference to the color of American money. An older term was greenback which was used to refer to American currency printed in the Civil War. The front of the bill was printed in black while the back was printed in green.

The slang term C note references that "C" equals 100 in the Roman numeral system and stands for the Latin word centum, which means “a hundred.” The Latin also gave us "cent" for one-hundredth of a dollar. A C note is a $100 bill.

Have you heard that "it's all about the Benjamins?" This slang term is also a substitute for $100 and alludes to the appearance of founding father Benjamin Franklin on the one-hundred-dollar bill. I haven't really heard anyone refer to a "Hamilton" for $10 or a "Jackson" to mean a $20 bill.

A very common slang term for dollars is bucks which we believe originated from early American colonists who would often trade deerskins, or buckskin, as a form of money.

Cha-ching (or Ka-ching) to mean money is a word that imitates the sound, as with an onomatopoeia, of an old-fashioned cash register completing a sale. I have heard it used to mean money but more often used as an interjection when money is made. "I made a bet and -  cha-ching - I got 75 bucks!"

And there are a long list of ones that still have no clear origin story. For example, moola (or moolah) is an old term for money, but nobody seems to really know where it originated. Merriam-Webster says the word was first used to mean money in 1936.

Here are others: "cabbage", "clam", "milk", "dosh", "dough", "shillings", "frogskins", "notes", "ducats", "loot", "bones", "bar", "coin", "folding stuff", "honk", "lolly", "lucre"/"filthy "Lucre", "moola/moolah", "mazuma", "paper", "scratch", "readies", "rhino."

Of course, slang varies by geography and money slang in India. Though I might only hear the term dosh used in the UK, I could probably hear dough or bread used to mean money in London or New York. 

synergy

SYNERGY is the interaction or cooperation of two or more organizations, substances, or other agents to produce a combined effect greater than the sum of their separate effects.

It appears in English in the mid-19th century with origins from Greek sunergos  "working together" from sun- ‘together’ + ergon ‘work’.

In Christian theology, synergism is the idea that salvation involves some form of cooperation between divine grace and human freedom.

The words synergy and synergetic have been used in the field of physiology to mean the correlation or concourse of action between different organs in health; and, according to some, in disease.

The word appeared in 1896 from Henri Mazel in social psychology in his La synergie sociale, in which he argued that Darwinian theory failed to account for "social synergy" or "social love", a collective evolutionary drive. The highest civilizations were the work not only of the elite but of the masses too; those masses must be led, however, because the crowd, a feminine and unconscious force, cannot distinguish between good and evil.

In technology and media, it is applied to the compression of transmission, access and use of information. Synergy can also be defined as the combination of human strengths and computer strengths, such as advanced chess. Computers can process data much more quickly than humans, but lack the ability to respond meaningfully to arbitrary stimuli.

In media economics, synergy is the promotion and sale of a product (and all its versions) throughout the various subsidiaries of a media conglomerate. For example, when a movie also has a soundtrack, toys, and video games. Walt Disney is given credit for pioneering "synergistic marketing" techniques in the 1930s by granting dozens of firms the right to use his Mickey Mouse character in products and ads, and continued to market Disney media through licensing arrangements.