Call for Papers: Names That Reveal; Names That Conceal: Onomastic Sleight of Hand in Global Literature (MLA 2027)

The American Name Society

Call for Papers

for the ANS virtual panel at the

Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention #mla27

7-10 January 2027, Los Angeles, California

Names That Reveal; Names That Conceal

Onomastic Sleight of Hand in Global Literature

Espionage novels and allegories often use names to conceal motives or plot twists or to reveal character or caricature. How have authors, poets, playwrights, screenwriters, lyricists and other wordsmiths used names of characters, places, corporations, institutions, movements, etc., to effect onomastic sleight of hand? And why? In this panel, we will consider names that reveal and names that conceal people groups (anthroponyms), characters (charactonyms), places (toponyms), theonyms (divine beings), events, and more in the real world and/or in imagined worlds from any era, from any place, as recorded or found in any media. Useful resources include, the archives of NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics (https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/issue/archive), the ANS list of terminology (https://ans-names.pitt.edu/ans/keywords), Dorothy Dodge Robbins’ edited collection Literary Onomastics (2023), Star Medzerian Vanguri’s edited collection Rhetorics of Names and Naming (2016), and the Oxford Handbook of Names and Naming(2018).

Proposal Submission Process:

Email Dr. Anne W. Anderson (editing@gmail.com) as follows:
1. Email Subject Line: Use “MLA 2027 proposal” in the subject line of the email.
2. Email Body: In the email body include the title and first line of the abstract, the full name(s) of the author(s), their affiliation(s), and their email address(es).
3. Proposal: Attach a PDF file that includes the proposal title, an abstract of up to 350-500 words, and a list of works cited. Do NOT include author identification in the PDF.
DEADLINE: Proposals must be received by 11:59 pm EST on Monday, 16 March 2026. Authors will be notified about the results of the blind review on or by 27 March 2026.
Contributors selected for the thematic panel must be members of both MLA and ANS in order to present their papers; both memberships must be obtained by 7 April 2026.
Questions? Please contact Dr. Anne W. Anderson (editing@gmail.com).

“Slop” is the American Dialect Society’s 2025 Word of the Year

The American Dialect Society, in its 36th annual words-of-the-year vote, selected slop as the Word of the Year for 2025. More than three hundred attendees took part in the deliberations and voting, in an event hosted in conjunction with the Linguistic Society of America’s annual meeting.

The word slop was recognized for its widespread use for low-quality, high-quantity content, most typically produced by generative AI. While AI slop was a nominee in the American Dialect Society’s 2024 Word of the Year vote, in 2025 slop could stand on its own, with the AI context often implicitly understood. Slop was also recognized as a productive combining form to describe anything of little value generated in mass quantities.

Presiding at the Jan. 9 voting session were Ben Zimmer, chair of the ADS New Words Committee, and Dr. Kelly Elizabeth Wright of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Slop isn’t a new word. It has moved from the pig sty, to the algorithm, and now forms new compounds such as sloppunk, slopification, and friend slop,” Dr. Wright said. “This productivity has no end in sight.”

Word of the Year is interpreted in its broader sense as “vocabulary item”—not just words but also phrases, compounds, and affixes. The items do not have to be brand-new, but they have to be newly prominent or notable in the past year.

The vote is the longest-running such vote anywhere, the only one not tied to commercial interests, and the word-of-the-year event up to which all others lead. It is fully informed by the members’ expertise in the study of words, but it is far from a solemn occasion.

Members in the 136-year-old organization include linguists, lexicographers, etymologists, grammarians, historians, researchers, writers, editors, students, and independent scholars. In conducting the vote, they act in fun and do not pretend to be officially inducting words into the English language. Instead, they are highlighting that language change is normal, ongoing, and entertaining.

Click here to read the press release, which has all the categories and voting results.

“No Kings” is the ANS Name of the Year for 2025

filed under Featured, Name News, Name of the Year

“No Kings” was chosen as the winner of the Name of the Year for 2025 by the American Name Society at its annual Name of the Year discussion and vote on January 8, 2026. This political demonstration name was selected for its direct communicative power, its linguistic brevity, and its extensions during the protests, in forms such as “no thrones” and “no crowns”.… Read More

Nominations Wanted for Names of the Year 2025

The American Name Society is requesting nominations for the “Names of the Year for 2025”. The names selected will be ones that best illustrate, through their creation and/or use during the past 12 months, important trends in the culture of the United States. It is not necessary, however, for a nominated name to have originated in the US. Any name can be nominated as long as it has been prominent in North American cultural discourse during the past year. Nominations are called for in the following categories:

Personal Names: Names or nicknames of individual real people or individual animals.
Place Names: Names or nicknames of any real geographical location, including all natural features, political subdivisions, streets, and buildings. Names of national or ethnic groups based on place names could be included here.
Trade Names: Names of real commercial products, as well as names of both for-profit and non-profit incorporated companies and organizations, including businesses and universities.
Artistic & Literary Names: Names of fictional persons, places, or institutions, in any written, oral, or visual medium, as well as titles of art works, books, plays, television programs, or movies. Such names are deliberately given by the creator of the work.
E-Names: Names of persons, figures, places, products, businesses, institutions, operations, organizations, platforms, and movements that exist in the virtual world.
Miscellaneous Names: Any name which does not fit in the above five categories, such as names created by linguistic errors, names of particular inanimate objects, names of unorganized political movements, names of languages, etc. In most cases, such items would be capitalized in everyday English orthography.

Winners will be chosen in each category, and then a final vote will determine the overall Name of the Year. Anyone may nominate a name. The discussion will be conducted by Laurel Sutton, ANS Past President and Name of the Year Coordinator.

You can nominate names via this form: https://nick662.typeform.com/to/qiS2bXas?typeform-source=www.americannamesociety.org

Advance nominations must be received no later than January 6, 2026, at midnight Pacific.

The winning names will be selected on Thursday, January 8, 2026 on Zoom from 12-2pm PST . Tickets are free and can be ordered here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/ans-name-of-the-year-2025-discussion-and-vote-tickets-1967205383257

The URL to our Zoom room will be sent to everyone who registers for this event.