Irony?

[vakkotaur]

While I am of the opinion that a lot of the controversy around sports team and mascot names is contrived nonsense, this article brings up a question that is oddly absent from the article. Never mind any problems with the name PorkChop. Why wasn't Ferrous, which had more submissions or nominations, chosen in the first place?

Comments

[woody-whistler.livejournal.com]

Typo, maybe? I suspect "32" should have been 302 or 320.

I've never heard of PorkChop being a racial slur before. Not that I keep track of that kind of thing...

[vakkotaur.livejournal.com]

Except that the article claims that "Ferrous" got the most votes, so either the typo was upstream from the news or.. something's screwy. I'd never heard of "PorkChop" being a slur either, but I am a bit isolated.

[thecanuckguy.livejournal.com]

I've come across stranger team names.

My altime favourite to the "why the hell have I not heard any complaints about *this* one" is the Clansmen. Yes, you heard right, the Murdoch MacKay Clansmen, the successful sport teams of a high school not that far from our house.

My wife, who grew up in this area (but didn't go to "Murdoch") was actually surprised that I expressed incredulity the first time I heard it. (And, yes, my wife is an intelligent woman who knows very well who the KKK are). She says it is related to Scottish clans (the school's namesake, obviously, being Scottish). I just can't parse how that name got past the censors (I don't know when Murdoch's sports teams were founded, and it's too late in the day for me to check, but I know that in 1866 (the Klan's first incarnation, what was to become Winnipeg was just a few trading posts back then. The school might date to shortly after the Klan's second incarnation, 1915, as I said, too late in the day to go Googling)