There's no "I" in [tim]

The one professional team I root for is playing the professional team I root against. My Detroit Red Wings are playing those Colorado Avelanches. Avelanchers?

See that's a problem with non-plural team nicknames. What do we call the individuals on the team? But maybe that's a good thing. It encourages a group mentality. As Mr Sapir-Whorf proved a long time ago it's impossible to be selfish on a team that doesn't allow you to refer to yourself as a single player.

And when you say that you're playing against an avalanche you're forced to imagine that you're playing against a force that you do not have the power to stop. The best you can hope for is that you will survive by outrunning it. Language forces these thoughts on us.

Which leagues and which teams have caught on to this bit of linguistic legerdemain?

NHL 3/30
The Colorado Avalanche the Minnesota Wild and the Tampa Bay Lightning. Get this -- the Lightning have only won Lord Stanley of Preston's Cup once. Scientists say the team will have to move to another city in order to win it a second time.

NBA 3/30
Here we find 3 More. The Miami Heat the Orlando Magic and the Utah Jazz. Again 10%.

NFL 0/32
They're not playing along. Not a single team uses a singular or mass noun as a nickname.

CFL 0/8
The Canadian Football League doesn't have any singular or mass nouns among their current 8 teams. But they've had a singular name before: the Las Vegas Posse in 1994.

The USFL had 2 out of 19: the Chicago Blitz and the Los Angeles Express.

Arena 9/17
Arena Football is crawling with non-plurals: the Chicago Rush the Colorado Crush the Georgia Force the Grand Rapids Rampage the Kansas City Brigade the New Orleans VooDoo the Philadelphia Soul the Tampa Bay Storm and the Utah Blaze. Eight singular and one mass: 9 out of 17.

MLB 0/30
And in baseball only the Soxes come close to squeaking by as singular/mass nicknames. But the OED tells us that we have to consider sox an altered form of the plural of sock. Damn dictionaries controlling our use of the language!

MLS 9/14
In this US version of a soccer league the naming gets confusing. You have a team like Chivas USA that goes by a plural count noun that few will recognize in English. But they can also be called the goats or a few other nicknames. D.C. United follows the lead of several European teams that claim simply the unity of a region. Then you have teams from Toronto and Dallas that simply call themselves Football Clubs. There's the Chicago Fire and the New England Revolution. You've got the Columbus Crew (they named themselves with a thesaurus: Hey what's another word for team?) the Houston Dynamo the LA Galaxy, and Real Salt Lake. Or is that the Real Salt Lake? These MLS teams like using count nouns in the singular. That's risky. It lends itself to one player's arrogance getting out of hand. It'll all be over for them when that egomaniac starts proclaiming I am the Dynamo! or I am the Galaxy! Only one player will be able to do so.

WNBA 9/14
Out of the 14 teams in the WNBA 9 of them are singular or mass nicknames: the Atlanta Dream the Chicago Sky the Connecticut Sun the Detroit Shock the Indiana Fever the New York Liberty the Minnesota Lynx the Phoenix Mercury and the Seattle Storm. The Phoenix Mercurys wouldn't do it as a name. It sounds like a garage full of not very sporty cars.

NCAA
And doing a quick run through NCAA teams we find the North Carolina State Wolfpack the Marshall Thundering Herd the Tulane Green Wave the Tulsa Golden Hurricane the Stanford Cardinal the Alabama Crimson Tide the North Texas Mean Green and the Nevada Wolf Pack. The herd and the wolf packs are collective nouns so the players can call themselves wolves or buffalo(es).

Where is all this heading?

Well I'm looking forward to following this second round of the playoffs because even tho an avalanche is often overwhelming I like my Red Wings' chances of playing well against six flakes at a time.


[correction: in the original piece I reported that 3 out of 30 is 30% when in fact 3 out of 30 is not 30%]

The spanjo can make it anywhere

Some of my favorite memories of undergraduate silliness were the great smokeouts of basement Cooley. Emu, Nature Boy, Big John and the King would each light up a huge cigar and choke the halls with a sweet cloud of Dominican smoke. But we weren't trying to act like grownups.We also regularly checked the door of The Halfway Inn Halfass at 3:30am to see if it was latched. When it wasn't we were able to satiate all our childish Mint Chocolate Chip and Superman ice cream needs.

Barry Popik has posted to ADS-L a brief report on the travels of an excellent Ann Arbor sandwich: the spanjo. The notable nosh--native to East Quad's Halfass (yes--just off basement Cooley)--has made it to the Big Apple. (For info on the city's nickname see Popik) Of the sandwich's journey he writes

I was reading today in Gothamist.com about a sandwich shop in NYC that offers the "spanjo" sandwich. It's spreading outside of Ann Arbor! (Too bad the Wikipedia entry was deleted last year [because] the sandwich wasn't popular enough.)

Alas. It deserves a page and more.

In his post he includes bits and pieces from Gothamist™, the menu from Papa Lima Sandwich in Brooklyn, Urban Dictionary, an RC wiki, a Friendster comment, a discussion thread regarding the deletion from Wikipedia (do a text search for "spanjo"), and an ILX bulletin board about Ann Arbor (A²~AA).

Mash all the recipes together and the sandwich is made of cream cheese, melted cheddar, Swiss Cheese, spliced apple, sauteed apples, and sprouts, on bread (possibly wheat, possibly toasted)--and some start by calling it a grilled cheese with some of the above. (Would that "spliced apple" be a typo for 'sliced-'? I remember them being sliced, not spliced--unless you consider that every ingredient is spliced into one sandwich. No--sliced.)

As I ordered the spanjo it was a grilled cheese of cheddar on wheat, with cream cheese, alfalfa sprouts and crunchy sliced apples. And that's the variety we'd expect from a weird sandwich in a strange dorm in a little cafe that says "Halfway Inn" on the wall (and all brochures and official web pages) but is known by everyone in EQ as The Halfass.

I first learned of the spanjo from my friend Susan who started at Michigan a year before I did. She told me I had to live in East Quad because that was the only dorm that promised to understand me. It was home to the Residential College where going to class in a bathrobe was common. It was the dorm that had Resident Fellows instead of Resident Assistants. Why? Just to be different.

Ingwords: definition - annoying words.

I hate the word blog. It's in the same category as borg. It has nothing to do with hating 'b's and 'o's and 'g's. There are actually a few reasons I hate it.

1) Any shortening of a word spleets my ears. This is true of all types of words including - or especially - proper nouns that become nicknames. These all give off an odour of 'I don't have the time to say the full word.' This combines with some weird sort of 'woohoo...look at me...I use this word enough to know its nickname...I know what the locals call it!' Here's the irony - locals often hate the most popular nicknames. Ever heard a native San Franciscan who says "Frisco"? Well even if they do I still hate it. I don't like jargon when it is embraced so easily and with the obvious desire to create delineate or espouse a new and fashionable community.

2) The word has become over productive. not only does it refer to a log on the web it refers to the act of writing a log on the web. And you can be a blogger. and we now have a blogosphere (we didn't crawl back like crabs and create the ethereal 'blogweb' - at least we avoided that). And I've even seen 'bloggly' used. now come on…

3) Most annoying about it is how it came about. A shortening of "web log", it took the coda of web, /b/, and put it onto log. I can almost stomach a form that simply truncates a last syllable. But to drop only the first part of a word and leave the last part to stick onto the onset of the second . . . ugh. I don't know why this bugs me. I'm not sure if it's as bad as borg - which takes cybernetic organism and shortens it to cyb-org then shortens it again to -b-org. So from first form to last we see that a /b/was pulled from the middle of a word and put at the start of another.

But now I have to retract all this and say that phonologically these are very predictable processes and they make perfect sense. I wonder if knowledge really is the key to tolerance.

Speaking of tolerance . . . can anyone guess why using -holic as a suffix bothers me? as in workaholic and chocoholic . . .

But I do love some words.
subtle - especially with the American English intervocalic flapping instead of a voiceless /t/
mellifluous - (Funny how that word changes so drastically by changing the /m/to /f/)
brat - It sounds so appropriate to what it means. Like subtle it's almost onomatopoetic.