Skip to main content

Team Names and Mascots

Draw Unicorn 10

 On a trip through Virginia a few years ago, I picked up a newspaper in the historic town of Appomattox and noticed on the sports page that the teams of Appomattox High School call themselves "The Generals." I bet when they lose, the sportswriters of the towns of the rival team can't help but begin with a lede like this: "The Appomattox Generals surrendered again Wednesday to the Jubreau Devil's crushing linesmen...."

Team names are funny things. The Appomattox High School's choice of name seems easy (at least in retrospect) to anyone with even a passing knowledge of US history. Other team names come to seem obsolete with the passage of time, or offensive, or become grandfathered in past our moral sense so that they aren't outrageous only because they've been around for a long time. 

My Junior High School's teams were named the "Chargers." What image (if any) comes to your mind when you hear that? A shopper pulling a credit card out of a wallet? Pickett's men lining up on the third day at Gettysburg? Or (more likely) some sort of animal? If the latter: what sort?  Personally, I think of a bull heading toward a matador, but that would likely not have made a fitting mascot, even if there were a team in the area named The Matadors. (Especially then.) 

 After the name had been in place for several years, the administration decided to create a art contest so some student would have had the honor of drawing the mascot that would go with this name. The winning beast turned out to be ... a unicorn. 

 Really? We were supposed to imagine a charging unicorn? 

 The unicorn portrayed in the winning design wasn't charging. It was rearing. 

 Are you wondering about the 'art' at the top of this post? I couldn't find any online depiction of the 'Big K' Charger. It was born and died (as the demographics of the town changed) in the days before the internet. Nor could I find a unicorn that was actually charging. But I found a website that will instruct you on how to draw your own rearing unicorn. You see one of the steps from those instructions above.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti
7 comments
Read more

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers
Post a Comment
Read more

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak
13 comments
Read more