“Pluto”
wins 2006 Name of the Year
In its meeting in
Ahmadinejad
-- The
President of Iran became a prominent character for the United States in
2005-2006. He is repeatedly being
denounced for developing his country's nuclear facilities. His religious affiliation with the Shiites in
Barbaro -- After a year of rebuilding
lives in the hurricane stricken southern states, floods and devastating fires
out west and a sad and controversial war in Iraq, this name represents all what
we are seeking as humans. Barbaro in his peak as a race horse brought
happiness, excitement, courage, bravery, strength, good sportsmanship and sheer
beauty. When he was injured and near death, he got humans to pray,
appreciate life and ask for hope. Now with his amazing
recovery, he does all of those things for humans all over again.
Beatrice
-- This name
is VERY important in the best-selling Lemony Snicket books. Through all of the books, Snicket
keeps the name Beatrice exactly the same, but treats it in a different way in
each book. She is the mysterious woman
who in the dedications is the recipient of his fondest feelings. The humor comes in the way Snicket creates
variations on the theme of missing her.
He starts with alliteration and surprise: “To Beatrice—darling, dearest,
dead.” Then he plays with switching from
literal to metaphorical meanings as in “For Beatrice—You
will always be in my heart, in my mind, and in your grave.” “For Beatrice—When we were together I felt
breathless. Now you are,” and “For
Beatrice—Our love broke my heart, and stopped
yours.” Judging from Book the Twelfth,
she died in a house fire as did the Baudelaire’s parents: “No one could
extinguish my love, or your house.” He
uses contrast in “For Beatrice—When we met, my life
began. Soon afterwards, yours ended,”
and comparison in “For Beatrice—Summer without you is as cold as winter. Winter without you is even colder.” “Book the Fourth” has the longest dedication:
To Beatrice—My love flew like a butterfly,
Until death swooped down
like a bat.
As the poet Emma Montana
McEllroy said:
“That’s the end of that.”
Books Tenth and Eleventh, respectively, are perhaps
the most enigmatic. “For Beatrice—When we met, you were pretty, and I was lonely. Now, I am pretty lonely,” and “For
Beatrice—Dead women tell no tales/ Sad men write them
down.” In the final Book the Thirteenth,
he writes, "I cherished, you perished, The
world's been nightmarished." Here he hints that Beatrice was the mother of
the Baudelaire children, but readers are still left with lots to wonder about.
“Blue Dog Democrats” -- The name comes from the
fact that they represent the “blue states,” but they’re not typical
Democrats. They’re sort of “dogs” as “Democrats. On National Public
Radio they explained that before the “Blue Dog Democrats” there were the
“Yellow Dog Democrats.” These are the Democrats located at the far
left. They are called “Yellow Dog Democrats” because “they would vote for
a Democrat even if it were a Yellow Dog.” It is said that when the
moderate democrats heard about the “Yellow Dog Democrats,” they “turned blue,”
and that is how they became the “Blue Dog Democrats.”
Flickr -- Flickr was a little-known website
when it came on the scene in early 2004, but a blog post (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2005/10/the_new_rules_o.html
) by Seth Godin in
October of 2005 pointed out the apparent greatness of the name to marketers
around the world. Marketers are now often asked by their business clients
if dropping a letter from a real word makes a good corporate name. All of
this is because of that one name. How has this affected the
world? Well, in less than an hour of searching on the internet over sixty
companies that use exactly the same naming convention (dropping the
penultimate vowel before a closing "r".) were found by the original
nominator of this name. Poems have been written as an homage
to the practice - composed entirely from real website and company names.
Jack -- It’s been the #1
most popular name in the UK for a decade and is
steadily rising in the US. On television it belongs to the protagonists on the
popular shows 24, Lost, Stargate and Alias, and it is also the name of the main character from this
year's most successful movie, Pirates of
the
“Macaca” -- Early in the Senate race in Virginia, incumbent republican George Allen was
leading democratic challenger Jim Webb by double-digit margins. Most political
pundits, as well as most Virginians themselves, thought Allen was unbeatable in
what was in 2000 and 2004 a solidly republican state. That changed on August
11, at a campaign rally in southwest
“Penguin Space Shuttle” -- This
was the nickname given to a recent space shuttle which was black and white, and
which couldn’t fly because of many delays. The illustrates both normal processes
of nicknaming, but also the recent fashionable place penguins seem to have had
in American society, as exemplified by cartoon characters such as Opus and
films such as The March of the Penguins and
Happy Feet.
Pluto -- In August 2006, the International
Astronomical Union, meeting in Prague, decided that Pluto did not meet a strict
scientific definition of “planet” and said that Pluto should be called a “dwarf
planet”, with the term “planet” reserved for objects whose gravity has cleared
the neighborhood around their orbits. This decision immediately caused an uproar in the general public around the world; even some
astronomers were upset. The word “plutoed” has already entered the English
language to mean “to downgrade, demote, or remove from a prestigious group or
list.” The great emotional reaction that many had to the demotion, often
expressed as feeling angry or sorry for Pluto, also shows how naming an
inanimate object or a place with a personal name, even of an ancient Roman god,
helps human beings to become personally attached to them.
Restless Leg Syndrome -- Since it is impossible to
prescribe medicine for a medical condition that has no name, it is necessary to
provide this condition with a name before anyone can sell medicine to treat the
condition. For years we’ve all had “restless legs,” but now that it is
named the “Restless Leg Syndrome” we can buy medicine to make it better.
Shiloh Nouvel Jolie-Pitt -- This name symbolized the cult of
celebrity gossip. When this child was born in
Suri -- When Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes gave
this name to their daughter in April 2006, no one really knew if it had a
connection with LRON or Scientology. Many believe it was a reference to LRON's hometown, Surrey, England. Cruise’s publicists claimed it was Hebrew for
“princess” (perhaps possible as a Yiddish form of Sarah) or Persian for
“beautiful red rose.” Whatever its derivation, the speculation surrounding the
name is another example of the present cult of celebrity.