"Saskatchewan Roughriders" and "Ottawa Rough Riders"

Image by Sangudo via FlickrI honour of Saskatchewan's loss in the Grey Cup last week, I present an oldie but a goody: the CFL. The Canadian Football League represents Canada in a way that few other Canadian insitutions ever will: rather hokey, definitely small-potatoes, and yet somehow carrying on year after year and never quite fading away into oblivion. I don't think that's praise exactly for the CFL, but it's if nothing else a fond recognition that, like the trains that used to run across this country, some Canadian traditions carry on long after people stop realising they're there...

I jest, mildly. For years, one of the best-known things about the CFL, particularly during its ill-fated jorney Down South, was the fact that in a league with only nine or so teams, two had almost exactly the same name. And a name that was/is, let's be honest, more than a little silly. Yes, I know, the two names were not exactly the same. Ottawa had - wate for it - a space between the 'rough' and the 'riders'. Saskatchewan didn't. Wikipedia tells me it's got to do with the fact that the two teams were for many years part of different conferences, which functioned almost like different leagues. Wikipedia also states that "the Ottawa team was named for the log rollers of the region's rivers while the Roughriders were named for an elite North-West Mounted Police corps of expert horsemen." None of which makes it any less silly.

Anyway, it's all in the past as the Ottawa team folded in 1996. In the intervening 14 years, Ottawa has managed to get, and then lose, a second team and is about to get a third. Perhaps they'll call themselves the "Argo Nauts".

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"Amor de Cosmos"

Image via WikipediaAwesomeness is largely a question of context. Let me explain. At first appearance, by itself the name "Amor de Cosmos" is awesomeness-neutral. Just a name. Closer inspection indicates it appears to more-or-less roughly translate as 'lover of the universe', which ramps up its awesomeness points.

But the knowledge that it was an alias, made up by an anglo Canadian born with the exceedingly pedestrian name William Alexander Smith removes those awesomeness points. Learning that he had his name legally changed while living in California, where he'd gone to participate in the Gold Rush, however, brings back those points, because anything connected with the Gold Rush is awesome.

Then learning that de Cosmos came back to British North America and served as Premier of British Columbia, serving a little more than a year in that highest of offices with silly quasi-Spanish and Hippyesque name intact throws the awesomeness levels through the roof. It reminds me of a time when the west was maybe a bit wilder than it currently is. And it could perhaps remind the beleaguered Gordon Campbell, upon his departure, that the office he's currently abandoning has been held by colourful people in the past.

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"Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump"

Might as well just leap right in with an explanation. A 'buffalo jump' is a small cliff-like natural formation on the plains. Buffalo being a herd animal, they rather famously like to stomp across the plains in stampedes. In pre-Columbian times, several Plains Indians tribes would attempt to divert a buffalo stampede so that the animals would, en masse, run off the cliff, breaking their legs and rendering them easy victims for hunters. So a buffalo jump was a place where you could make buffalo jump, to their (indirect) death.

Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump is such a buffalo jump, located in Alberta. The Blackfoot name for the site, now a UNESCO-protected heritage site, is Estipah-skikikini-kots, definitely an awesome name all by itself, particularly that middle bit. Apparently it refers to some Blackfoot person who was too eager to see the buffalo jump at work and decided (stupid, stupid man) to go under it and look up. He obviously got his head smashed in, and instead of calling it "Idiot-Looking-Up Buffalo Jump", they went for the more poetic "Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump".

So now you know how one of the coolest place names ever got its name.

Incidentally, the Blackfoot people could also be here on this very list. The first time I'd ever heard the word 'Blackfoot' was when I was a Cub Scout, and there were sew-on badges you could get saying "Je parle francais", "Ich spreche Deutch", etc. One was for Blackfoot, and I can remember confusedly asking my Cub Scout leader what on earth 'I speak Blackfoot' was meant to mean. He looked at the catalogue I was reading from, squinted his eyes a bit, then sagely concluded, "I guess it's a language." I thought it was just about the weirdest name possible. Still do.

"O-Pee-Chee"

Image via Wikipedia

It's sometimes very strange being Canadian. When in the USA, kids of a certain inclination would get all obsessive about collecting playing cards featuring sports players on them, trading with friends, buying albums to keep them in, buying pack after pack to find elusive cards required to complete sets, eschewing the opposite sex entirely, they would do so in support of a company called "Topps". In Canada, however, while all of the above could well be true, it would be in support of a company with an altogether stranger name: "O-Pee-Chee".

Like summer camps and Boy Scout events from the 1960s,the O-Pee-Chee name feels like a vague English-friendly approximation of a native American word, and according to O-Pee-Chee themselves, it is: they claim it means "the Robin", and is an 'aboriginal word' (since there is, you know, only one Frist Nations language). Why a trading card company would name itself after a bird, I don't know. But they do also point out the more obvious fact: that it's a rough homophone for "Oh! Peachy!", which is what I presume they hoped prepubescent boys would squeal upon receiving a pack of these cards.

It now being a good forty years since anyone ever uttered the interjection 'peachy' with anything other than satirical intent, it's a name that evokes little more than (1) what a silly name, and (2) part of it is a word for urine. Yay!

Not that 'Topps' is that great a name, mind you. But at the same time, well, it's no 'O-Pee-Chee'.

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"Inky Mark"

Okay, politics. Canadian politics. Dude was a hotshot in the two parties that preceded the currently-governing Conservative Party of Canada. Not my personal brand of politics, but dude was a relatively decent proponent of those parties' particular brands of populist conservatism: so decent, in fact, that he abandoned ship to another conservative party before they united under one broad umbrella. I say 'was' - he's not dead, but he's quite sidelined politically. All that manoeuvring will get you nowhere, my mother used to say.

Beside the point. The point is that dude's name is Inky. Well, of a sort. Wikipedia tells me his name is 麥鼎鴻, or in Pinyin Mài Dǐnghóng, which is a pretty awesome name too. But in English he has an adjective for a first name and a first name for a surname, such that "Inky Mark" sounds like the nickname the schoolboys gave poor Mark Jones when his pen exploded on him one day. And that is truly awesome.