The Onomatamaniac

Sporting Semantics 1 - "The Red Devils"

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:16:43 +0200

The Red Devils is a nickname for the second best team in Manchester (and 442nd best team in England), Manchester United Football Club. United, as they are also commonly known (this nickname is derived, obviosuly, from the contraction of the words Manchester United), was founded in 1878 as Newton Heath LYR (standing for Lancashire Yorkshire Railways, for which the founders worked). In 1902, the club was bankrupted and it reformed as Manchester United. 60 years passed, and United's nickname during this period was initially the Heathens and later the Busby Babes. In the early '60s, the nearby Salford Rugby Club toured France, and the ever-imaginative French nicknamed the side The Red Devils due to their distinctive Red jerseys. On their return, United manager Matt Busby heard of this and liked the nickname. The club badge was redesgined to show a devil with a pitchfork, and the name has stuck.

I am indebted to a variety of sources for this entry, most noticeably Bob Wilson's fantastic book.

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Onomatamaniac.

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:49:29 +0200

Onomatamania is an obsession with a particular word which a person uses repeatedly or which intrudes into consciousness regularly. We all get it occasionally. Some of us, like me, get it all the time. My most recent case of onomatamania was with the word onomatamaniac (hence the blog) which i assume to mean a person who suffers from regular bouts of onomatamania. Which words get stuck in your head all the time? No, blokes, excluding that. Yes, this is the kind of fascinating thing i will be exploring, daily, or more often, or less often, so not daily, but we can call it daily, in my blog. How about that?

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WWW.

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:16:18 +0200

Okay, so here goes my first proper post. In this, the twenty first century AD and the first century AC (after computers?), one of the most commonly uttered utterances must be that of "double-u double-u double-u dot...". This, though, doesn't quite fit in with real 21st Century principles; speed, laziness, fecklessness. Say it out loud. "WWW." The phrase, all things considered, is 10 syllables long. It is an acronym (try saying that one out loud EDIT: i think it's only me who can't.) for World Wide Web, which is three syllables, plus one for the dot. So, readers, tell me why oh why oh why do we insist on "shortening" it to WWW.? Dreary me.

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So this is...blogging? Fancy...blogging...together sometime?

Mon, 06 Oct 2008 19:11:13 +0200

I hear this is called blogging. It's nice. I have been advised to make this first blog some sort of fantazazazazamorphigal awesomnity from the far reaches of outer-space in order to captivate you guys, and keep you coming back for more and more. And more.

So let me tell you a wee bit about myself; well, i'll tell you what's relevant to the blog, you guys will have to work out the rest for yourselves. I'm Ollie, a kid with a passion for words, for language, for accuracy and for...dumdumdum...grammar! [gasps] I'm an A-level student at the moment and i'm looking to study English at university next year. More on that in a future post.

This blog, then, will be your primary resource for encapsulating, sometimes gramaticaly incorrect, comentary on some the quirks of the greatest language that ever graced the earth. Fear not, I will keep it light. A comedy infused stream of consciousness for the semantically obsessed armchair scholars of the twenty-first century.

So anyway, if you like this, do what ever you people do; subscribe, comment, adore etcetera. The regularity of this blog will begin as daily, then we'll see how popular it gets.

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