Invitation to Apply for the ANS Emerging Scholar Award 2019

ANS Logo final 1 img onlyThe Emerging Scholar award recognizes the outstanding scholarship of a names researcher in the early stages of their academic or professional career. To be eligible for this award, applicants must meet the following criteria:

  1. Be an entry-level professional, an untenured academic, or a student;
  2. Have had their single authored abstract accepted for presentation at the ANS annual conference; and
  3. Be a member of the ANS.

To be considered for this award, applicants must submit the full text of their paper by midnight (E.S.T.) the 5th of December 2019 to both ANS President Dr. Dorothy Dodge Robbins (drobbins@latech.edu) and this year’s ESA Chair, Dr. Jan Tent (jan.tent@mq.edu.au). Submissions must be sent as an email attachment in either a .doc or .docx format. For ease of processing, please be sure to include the keyword “ESA2019” in the subject line of your email.

The submission may not exceed 2,500 words (including the references, notes, and keywords but excluding any charts, graphs, or tables).

All submissions must include the following text elements in the order listed below:

  • 100-word abstract
  • 5 key words
  • Introduction
  • Methodology
  • Discussion
  • Conclusion
  • Notes (not to exceed 5 in number nor contain more than a total of 100 words)
  • List of references

In addition to these basic organizational guidelines, authors are asked to use the formatting rules listed in the official style sheet of NAMES, the journal of the American Name Society. Submissions will not only be judged upon the quality of the writing and the scientific merit of the study presented, but also on their adherence to these formatting regulations.

Papers previously published are not eligible for consideration. However, papers based on unpublished theses or dissertations are eligible. The Emerging Scholar Award Selection Committee will judge all submissions for their methodological soundness, innovation, and potential contribution to the field of onomastic research. The awardee will not only receive a cash prize, but will also be mentored by a senior onomastics scholar who will assist the awardee in preparing their paper for submission and possible publication in the ANS journal, NAMES: A Journal of Onomastics. Past recipients of the Emerging Scholar award are eligible to re-apply for this award for an entirely new piece of scholarship which examines a different area of onomastic research. However, preference may be given to applicants who have not yet received the award. In addition, the Selection Committee reserves the right to refrain from giving this award in those years in which no submission is deemed to have met the above-mentioned requirements.

 

Kansas City Removed Martin Luther King’s Name From Boulevard

After contentious debate, the Missouri city christened a street after the civil rights leader this year. Residents decided to revert it to Paseo Boulevard.

Voters decided to strip the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s name from a street in Kansas City, Mo., nine months after city leaders dedicated a major thoroughfare to the civil rights leader. The decision caps more than a year and a half of contentious debate over how to honor Dr. King. It once again makes Kansas City the rare major American city without a street named for him.

But those who wanted the street returned to its former name, Paseo Boulevard, heralded the result as a win for a black community that they say was ignored when the decision to change the name to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard was first made.

Lecture “Place-names and the medieval landscape in the Manchester area”, Manchester, UK, November 6 2019

This lecture focuses on the place-names of Greater Manchester and adjacent area, looking at the elements or linguistic building blocks which make up the names themselves, and showing how they may be mapped, plotted and interpreted. We will look at examples of medieval documents which give us early forms of the names, showing how the methodologies for interpretation have evolved over the past 200 years.

Place-names are among the defining markers of modern society – and they have much to tell us about how the society developed.

About the speaker: Alan Crosby read geography at St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and has a doctorate from Oxford University. He is one of Britain’s leading local and regional historians, and since 2001 has been the editor of The Local Historian, the national journal for the subject.

Call for papers: Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century, Paris, France, June 17-19 2020

G21C (Grapholinguistics in the 21st Century) is a biennial conference bringing together disciplines concerned with grapholinguistics and more generally the study writing systems and their representation in written communication. The conference aims to reflect on the current state of research in the area, and on the role that writing and writing systems play in neighboring disciplines like computer science and information technology, communication, typography, psychology, and pedagogy.

They welcome proposals from all disciplines concerned with the study of written language, writing systems, and their implementation in information systems: epistemology of grapholinguistics, history, onomastics, topics, interaction with other disciplines, etc.

Submission deadline: January 13, 2020

You are invited to submit original contributions in the form of extended abstracts (not exceeding 1,000 words), written in English and anonymized.

Stories Behind Georgia Place-Names, Cumming, GA, November 4 2019

Ever wonder how Rough and Ready got its name? Or what Stonesthrow is a stone’s throw from? The curious Georgian can’t help pondering the seemingly endless supply of head-scratching place names that dot this state.

Luckily, the intrepid Cathy Kaemmerlen, author of Georgia Place-Names from Jot-Em-Down to Doctortown, stands ready to unravel the enigmas – Enigma is, in fact, a Georgia town – behind the state’s most astonishing appellations. Cow Hell, Gum Pond, Boxankle and Lord a Mercy Cove? One town owes its name to a random sign that fell off a railcar, while another memorializes a broken bone suffered by a cockfight spectator. And just how many place names were inspired by insolent mules? Come on in to find out.

Copies of Georgia Place-Names from Jot-Em-Down to Doctortown will be available for purchase and signing.

When: Mon, Nov. 4, 2019 at 6:30 PM
Where: Forsyth County Public Library – Hampton Park Library, 5345 Settingdown Road, Cumming, GA, 30041

Name Change Reflects Shift in United Nations Approach to Communications

Renaming the Department of Global Communications was a reflection of a shift in the way in which the United Nations approaches communications, the departmental head told the Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) after it approved three draft resolutions on decolonization issues before taking up questions relating to information.

Melissa Fleming, Under-Secretary-General for Global Communications, told the Committee that the newly renamed entity — formerly the Department of Public Information — aims to make the public care about multilateralism through storytelling and by humanizing its work. She went on to say that coverage of the General Assembly’s recent high-level period demonstrated the Department’s strategic advance planning, which — alongside its more integrated multimedia production — helped to create multilingual content that was distributed in real time across multiple platforms.

About Names: From the Bible to ‘Family Guy,’ Seth’s had a long run

Actor Seth Rogan

Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his October 26th column, he looks at the history of the name Seth.

Seth is the English form of Shet, Hebrew for “appointed.” In the Bible’s Book of Genesis, Seth is Adam and Eve’s third son, born after oldest brother Cain kills second brother Abel. That’s about all Genesis says. Later legends say Seth journeys to Paradise, where he sees a vision of the future newborn Jesus. Seth writes a book describing the star foretelling the baby’s birth. Centuries later, this guides the wise men to Bethlehem.

These legends were featured in “Cursor Mundi,” a poem written in northern England around 1300. Perhaps that’s why Seth was used by several prominent Yorkshire families by 1450, a century before the Reformation created a general fashion for Old Testament names.

When Social Security’s yearly baby name lists started in 1880, Seth ranked 349th. Like most Old Testament names, it then declined, bottoming out at 907th in 1930. Seth then rose, booming in the 1970s to a plateau at around No. 100 between 1979 and 1997. Pop culture doesn’t seem to have had a big influence, even though its first peak, at 89th in 1987, was helped by the 1986 horror film “The Fly,” in which scientist Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) turns into an insect.

Want to know more? Read on to find out more about Seths in history!

Americans, we can name an exoplanet!

 

The International Astronomical Union (IAU) invites you to help name an exoplanet and its star.

A national committee for the US naming event has been specially created by the National Outreach Coordinators to carry out the campaign at the national level. The national committee strictly follows the methodology and guidelines set up by the IAU100 NameExoWorlds Steering Committee and is responsible for providing the conditions for public participation, disseminating the project in the country and establishing a voting system.

The US Exoplanet Naming Campaign collected names from September 15 – October 15, 2019. The US National Committee received hundreds of proposals. A group of 40 amateur and professional astronomers, teachers and students will identify 10 proposals that will be voted on by the US public. This list of 10 semi-finalists will be made public and available for public voting on November 1st, 2019. Public voting will be open until November 14, 2019. The top three selected by US voters will be submitted by November 15 to the IAU100 NameExoworlds Steering Committee for the final choice. The final result will be announced by the IAU the week of December 16 – 21, 2019.

Chicago Aldermen Propose New Name for Lake Shore Drive

Two City Council members want to rename Lake Shore Drive to honor Chicago’s founder, Jean Baptiste Point duSable.

DuSable, a black pioneer and fur trader, was the first non-indigenous person to live in what is now Chicago. The idea came to Ald. David Moore three years ago while taking a tour of the city. Moore and Ald. Sophia King introduced an ordinance to the Committee on Transportation and the Public Way to rename Lake Shore Drive. Moore also sees the name change as an opportunity to educate tourists and Chicago residents, both young and old, about the city’s founder.

DuSable was born in Haiti in 1745 to a French mariner and a mother who was a slave of African descent. He arrived in the 1770s and lived alongside the Chicago River near Lake Michigan. He farmed and traded fur and grain.