About Names: Keith, popular in Britain, peaked in U.S. when Rolling Stones came along

Artist Keith Haring

Dr. Cleveland Evans writes about names for the Omaha World-Herald. In his December 18th column, he looks at the history of the name Keith.

Keith’s a Scottish surname from the “lands of Keith” in the county of East Lothian. The place name may come from Pictish for “woods.” Clan Keith is an important Scottish clan. The name of its founder is unknown. He was a warrior who killed Danish leader Camus at the Battle of Barrie in 1010. King Malcolm II granted him the lands of Keith and the title “Camus Slayer.”

As a famous aristocratic surname, Keith attracted use when the custom of giving surnames as first names took off in the 19th century. In Britain’s 1851 census, there were 96 Keiths in Scotland and 61 in England. The 1850 United States Census found 41 Keiths, only a quarter of Britain’s total when the two nations’ populations were about equal.

One-syllable names are now out of fashion. In 2017 Keith ranked 493rd, its lowest since 1901. Perhaps in another 40 years Keith will make parents happy again.

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

Call for Papers: CSSN: Canadian Society for the Study of Names, Vancouver, Canada, June 1-2 2019

The Canadian Society for the Study of Names (CSSN) / Société canadienne d’onomastique (SCO) will hold its annual meeting as part of the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences of Canada, June 1 – 2, 2019, at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. 

This year’s conference features a special presentation by Dr. Claire Boudreau, Chief Herald of Canada, on the topic, “The Representation of Names in Contemporary Canadian Heraldry: The Making of Canting Arms and What they Tell About Names and Naming.” They especially invite papers that address the representation of names in various forms or media, but we welcome presentations on any onomastic topic. Papers may be presented in either French or English. For further information, please see the full call for papers on the SCCN website.

 
 

Abcde, a name more common that you might think

filed under Name News

Recently, a mother traveling alone with her disabled daughter on a Southwest Airlines flight encountered a blatant case of name discrimination at the hands of a Southwest employee at the ticket counter.  Upon discovering the daughter’s name, “Abcde” (pronounced ‘Ab-si-dee’), the ticket agent not only openly ridiculed the name within earshot of the family by proclaiming that “some parents should be slapped!”.… Read More

Call for Papers: LxGr2019, Ormskirk, UK, June 22 2019

A symposium on lexis and grammar is scheduled to take placed on Saturday, June 22, 2019 at Edge Hill University in Ormskirk (UK).  Entitled Corpus Approaches to Lexicogrammar (LxGr2019), the focus of this event is Halliday’s view of lexis and grammar as ”complementary perspectives”.  LxGr is particularly interested in paper proposals that focus, for example, discuss different interpretations of the nature of lexicogrammar; operate within any theoretical approach that takes into account the interaction of lexis and grammar (e.g. Construction Grammar, LexicalGrammar, Pattern Grammar, Systemic Functional Grammar, Valency Grammar). 

If you would like to present, send an abstract of 500 words (excluding references) to Costas Gabrielatos (gabrielc@edgehill.ac.uk). Please make sure that the abstract clearly specifies the research questions or hypotheses, the corpus and methodology, the theoretical orientation, and the main findings.

The call for papers can be found here. The deadline for abstract submission is 17 February 2019.

Call for Papers: Conference on Lexicography in the Nordic Region, June 4-7 2019, Helsing­fors, Fin­land

From the 4th to the 7th of June 2019, Helsinki, Finland will be the site of a scientific conference on lexicography, “15 konferensen om lexikografi i Norden”. The primary languages of the conference are Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The deadline for submission of abstracts for 20-minute scientific presentations is December 31, 2018.  For more on this event, please consult the official conference website.

The conference is organized by the Institute for native languages, in cooperation with the University of Helsinki and the Nordic Association for Lexiography. The theme is: Dictionaries – by who, for whom and why? Other submissions on lexicography in theory and practice are welcome. The posts can be in the form of lectures or posts  Three plenary speakers have been invited: Anna Helga Hannesdóttir, Iztok Kosem and Nina Martola.

Call for Papers: Research in Corpus Linguistics journal

A call for papers has been released for a special issue on Research in Corpus Linguistics for the peer-reviewed journal of the Spanish Association for Corpus Linguistics, AELINCO. Scholars working within the areas of computational linguistics, typology, and lexicology are encouraged to send in their contributions by January 20, 2019. Submissions should be sent to the editor of the special issue, Dr Ignacio Rodríguez (Universidad Autónoma de Querétaro, México) via email: i.rodriguezuaq.edu.mx. 

In particular, previously unpublished research articles and book reviews are invited which address one or more of the following topics: corpus design, compilation and typology; discourse, literary analysis and corpora; corpus-based grammatical studies; corpus-based lexicology and lexicography; corpora, contrastive studies and translation; corpus and linguistic variation; corpus-based computational linguistics; corpora, language acquisition and teaching; and special uses of corpus linguistics.  

Author guidelines can be found at the website.

Call for Papers: International Conference on Verbal Humor, Alicante, Spain, Oct 23-25, 2019

From October 23-25, 2019, at Spain’s University of Alicante (San Vicente del Raspeig), a session of the International Conference on Verbal Humor will be held.  For this event, a special call for papers has been issued for a panel that will address the relationship between humor and irony. For more on the event, please consult the conference website. The deadline for submissions is January 31st, 2019. 

Keynotes speakers include:

  • Salvatore Attardo ( Texas A&M University – Commerce)
  • Tony Veale (University College Dublin)
  • Victor Raskin (Purdue University)
  • Nancy Bell (Washington State University)
  • Helga Kotthoff (University of Freiburg)

They welcome original papers, written either Spanish or English. Abstracts must be no longer than 350 words (without references). Each paper will be presented within a 20-minute period, plus 10 minutes for discussion and questions.

Australian archaeologists dropped the term “Stone Age” decades ago, and so should you

The term “Stone Age” is used to refer to early periods in human cultural evolution, and to describe cultures that are seen as “backward” or “primitive”. This attitude can be sourced back to 1877, when American anthropologist Lewis Morgan argued that all human populations progressed through three stages of development: Savagery, Barbarism, and Civilization.

Stone working was a key technology as hominids spread throughout the world, and remained so until the Iron Age, which began about 3,000 years ago. After that, their use started to decline in some parts of the world. Contrary to popular belief, stone tool technology is not simple. It is highly skilled, requiring knowledge of geomorphology, geology, fracture mechanics and the thermal properties of stone.

Want to know more? Click through to this highly informative article at The Conversation by Alice Gorman, Senior Lecturer in Archaeology and Space Studies, Flinders University, Australia.