With so many brands changing hands these days, you’d be hard-pressed to keep with who owns what. Check out this article from SmallBusiness.co.uk to see how your average Brit scores on brand countries of origin. Can you do better? It helps if you’re a fan of HP Sauce, Newcastle Brown Ale, or The Body Shop!
Image Source: m01229 from USA (https://www.flickr.com/people/39908901@N06)
Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. On Valentine’s Day, he wrote about the history of the name Valentine and how Chaucer gave us Valentine’s Day (sort of).
Did you remember the flowers and candy?
Today is St. Valentine’s Day, when couples the world over celebrate their love.
Valentine is one of several ancient Roman names derived from Latin valere, “to be strong and healthy.”
The original St. Valentine was bishop of Terni, a town northeast of Rome, martyred on Feb. 14, 273. Though not included in the earliest lists of Christian martyrs, by 500 he was being venerated as a saint.
According to legend, Valentine miraculously restored the sight of a Terni judge’s blind daughter, and the entire family became Christians. For this, Emperor Claudius II had Valentine beheaded.
St. Valentine wasn’t popular in medieval England — not a single English church is dedicated to him — but his name was brought to England by Norman conquerors in 1066. Families called Valentine had medieval ancestors named after him.
An Englishman was first to link Valentine with romance. Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400), famous for “The Canterbury Tales,” also wrote “Parlement of Foules” to honor the 1381 engagement of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia. Here the poet dreams of birds flocking to Nature’s temple.
Translated into modern English, Chaucer wrote: “For this was on St. Valentine’s Day, when every bird comes to choose his mate.”
Though it was then believed birds chose mates in February, Chaucer was first to say this happened on Valentine’s Day.
Chaucer’s idea spread quickly throughout Britain and France. By 1470, people were calling lovers “my Valentine.” The saint’s legend was rewritten to say he was martyred for performing Christian marriages, justifying his link with romance.
Meanwhile Valentin had become popular in Germany and the Slavic nations, because of both St. Valentine of Terni and St. Valentine of Rhaetia, a fifth century missionary to Tyrol known as patron saint of epileptics.
In the 1850 U.S. census, the first listing all by name, there were 5,271 Valentines; 26.6 percent were born in Germany, while only 2.5 percent of the total population was.
In 1880, when Social Security’s yearly baby name lists start, Valentine ranked 635th. Its peak year was 1903, at 409th. It then slowly faded, leaving the top thousand in 1956.
Short form Val was in the top thousand on its own from 1930 until 1970, peaking at 523rd in 1952.
Valentin, the form in Spanish as well as German and Russian, has been in the top thousand since 1980. It suddenly shot up from 911th in 2006 to 614th in 2007. Valentín Elizalde, a popular Mexican singer gunned down by drug cartels in November 2006, was posthumously nominated for a Grammy Award in 2007.
The Italian form Valentino also had a huge jump after a celebrity’s death; in this case, Rudolph Valentino (1895-1926), the silent film heartthrob whose sudden death was followed by mass hysteria. Some 100,000 people lined New York City streets at his funeral, and Valentino jumped from nowhere to 683rd in 1927 — then just as quickly disappeared. (In 2006, Valentino returned to the top thousand. It ranked 675th in 2015.)
Valentine and Val have special connections with Nebraska. The city of Valentine, seat of Cherry County, was named after then-U.S. Rep. Edward K. Valentine (1843-1916) in 1883. Every year on Feb. 14, thousands of people have cards and packages mailed from the city to get the special postmark.
In 1923, Fred and Frances Fitch, then living in Cherry County, named their youngest son Val. Val L. Fitch (who died in 2015) won the 1980 Nobel Prize in physics for showing subatomic particles don’t necessarily obey laws of symmetry.
Father Valentine “Val” Peter (born 1934) was executive director of Boys Town from 1985 to 2005. He was named after his Bavarian-born grandfather, Valentin J. Peter (1875-1960), publisher of a German-language newspaper in Omaha.
Hollywood star Val Kilmer (1959) is probably best known for 1995’s “Batman Forever.”
Valentin “Val” Chermerkovskiy (1986) has competed on “Dancing With the Stars” 11 times since 2011, winning twice, including last fall’s season. To fans of the show, he’s as big a star as his celebrity partners.
As a baby name, Valentine remains rare — and may be changing gender. Forty-one girls and 31 boys were named Valentine in 2015. Best-selling novelist Adriana Trigiani’s “Valentine” trilogy, in which Italian-American Valentine Roncalli saves her family shoe business and finds true love, may be the cause. Whether male or female, Valentines will be associated with romance for centuries to come.
Photo: Joe Buglewicz
Wall Street, Broadway, The Bowery, Houston: the streets of New York City are famous around the globe. Did you ever wonder where their names came from? At NYCGo, Adam Kuban writes about some iconic NYC street names and their origins.
Hot tips: Houston Street is pronounced “how-ston”, not “hugh-ston”. And there really was a canal where Canal Street is today! Finally, no New Yorkers call it Avenue of the Americas; it’s Sixth Ave. Now you know.
The Research Institute of Information and Language Processing (RIILP) at the University of Wolverhampton (UK) has just announced a new MA degree programme in Practical Corpus Linguistics. One of the key components of this interdisciplinary programme will be Lexicography. Information about the entry requirements, course fees, and course curriculum can be found here.
If you would like to learn how to explore language using innovative techniques and computer tools, then the course will offer you cutting-edge, research-led training of the highest quality, taught by leading researchers in the fields of linguistics and computer science.
You will have options enabling you to study:
– How people use words to make meanings;
– How to analyse real language usage;
– The role of phraseology, metaphor, and idioms;
– Creative and poetic uses of language;
– New approaches to language teaching;
– Translation tools such as translation memory systems;
– Creating dictionaries using new kinds of evidence;
– Using computer tools for teaching and translation.
Join the team of international researchers and start exploring language now!
Yale University has just announced that the college previously named after former John C. Calhoun, the 7th Vice President of the United States and diehard slavery advocate, will be renamed after Grace Murray Hopper. An awardee of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Dr. Hopper earned a MA in mathematics and a PhD in mathematics and mathematical physics in the 1930’s from Yale University and invented the first compiler for computer languages. Along with her long-list of achievements in computer science, “Amazing Grace” as she was often affectionately named, she served more than four decades in the United States Navy and reached the rank of Rear Admiral. Yale’s recent decision marks the end to a long and contentious onomastic debate that had sharply divided the university’s community. In a statement given to the New York Times, Rianna Johnson-Levy, 21, a senior from Ann Arbor, Mich., who was involved in the protests, stated: “This is definitely a victory, but we’re not done fighting […] It’s our job to keep pushing Yale in the right direction.”
For companies trying to convince consumers that artificially intelligent robots are helpful, not scary, giving them a cute name seems like one of the first steps. Linguist and verbal branding expert Christopher Johnson explains why “they sound like the kind of names you might give your dog.” But while we might want our bots to have the semblance of a personality (including a sense of humor), we don’t necessarily want them to seem too human. Read more at Fast Company.
ANS member and Director of Product Development at Ethnic Technologies Lisa Spira recently discussed baby name trends with Redbook magazine. Find out about the the millennial name trends that got us to Emma, Emily, Elizabeth, Ella, and Evelyn. Lisa also has a prediction for which letter is coming next for little girls.
Are you fascinated by placenames? Do you have a weakness for tea, clotted cream, strawberry preserves, and homemade scones? Have you ever thought how cool it would be to be a part of an international project to preserve the cultural history of Great Britain? If you answered “Yes”, then you will be happy to hear that volunteers are being solicited to help collect and preserve all of the names of places (yes, ALL) in Britain from the Ordnance Survey’s six-inch to the mile maps of the early 20th century. Interested in learning more? Just follow this link!
By contributing to this project you’ll be helping to compile the most detailed list of historic places in Britain. It is intended that the GB 1900 gazetteer will form the backbone of a national collection of the country’s historic place-names, comprising everything from the earliest medieval records to the field-names still known to modern farming families. The names of places are a vital key to unlocking the social and linguistic history of the land. They recall agricultural practices and local industries, changed landscapes and lost settlements. They preserve a rich heritage of Welsh- and Gaelic-language forms from across Wales and Scotland, chart the arrival of English, and illustrate interactions between the two.
Image: Shutterstock
If you want to protect a business name, you should trademark it. And that’s just what singer Kylie Minogue did in 2006, for the name “Kylie”. So when US reality TV star Kylie Jenner filed for the mark “Kylie” for her clothing and beauty empire, it was refused, because it would be too easy to confuse the two marks. Will Kylie Jenner’s appeal gain her any ground? Read the whole article here.
An intrigued visitor checks out the Trumpchi GS7 at the North American International Auto Show in Detroit, January 20, 2017. Photo Credit: Jim Dunne
At Forbes, Michael Dunne writes about the next Chinese auto coming to the US: the Trumpchi SUV. It was was China’s fastest-growing car brand in 2016, scoring highest among all Chinese car brands. Officials at GAC, Guangzhou Automotive Corporation, insist privately that there is no connection to President Donald Trump. Chinese customers know the brand by its two Chinese characters, pronounced chuan chee. Those characters mean “delivering good fortune.” But will it have the same name in the U.S.? Head over to Forbes to get the whole story.
