Fogey Vs. Names

Occasionally I get the urge to get out a cane, put in my chewing-out dentures, hike up my pants to my neck line, and say, "Consarn it!" a lot. Then I realize that I don't need to walk with a cane (yet), I have all my own teeth (for the moment), I hate wedgies, and I'm not living in the early 1900s. That's my inner crotchety fogey coming out to play, because darn it, sometimes change annoys me.

Today's change is the sudden trend in names. I don't mean people's names either; that's a topic for another time (and another place, since any time I talk about it I get accused of being a racist). I'm talking about the names of sports teams and music groups.

I remember back in the good old days when teams had plural names. The Wildcats? Check. The Cardinals? Check. The Heat? Sorry. The Jazz? Especially not in Utah. What was wrong with being able to say, "Oh, he's been traded to New York, so he's a Yankee now," as opposed to having to say, "Oh, he's moved to another team; he's a Heat now." See, you can't say it. It doesn't work. Stick to plurals, so we don't have to call people players for the Heat.

And then there are bands. The Bravery? What the hell? That's a combination of two trends which I oppose, the trend of naming bands after singulars (which is okay when not combined with the next trend) and the trend of all bands being named, "The Nouns." In their place, either of these trends could be okay, but combined, I begin to wonder whether or not The Bravery are a new hockey team or something.

What was wrong with the old way of doing things? We got out of the era where all bands had to be named things like, "Rick Breem and his Band of Esteem," the era of, "Dina and the Wharf-Rats," even the era of all bands simply being named, "The Nouns." We had moved into an era where all bands didn't have to be named any particular way, and it was glorious. It was an era that could encompass The Smashing Pumpkins, sometimes know as Smashing Pumpkins, and sometimes known as Billy Corgan and the Pumpkin-Smashers (it's a joke, I say, a joke, son).

Now we get The This and The That and The Other Thing, and some of them have the decency to give themselves plural names, but I can see the creep arriving. Soon, every band will be named, "The Feeling," or, "The Ugly," or, "The Jazz."

Maybe by then all the sports teams will have adopted soccer-style European-esque names like The Utah United and we'll be really in trouble.