The American Blade: Etymologies of a Newspaper Name

Abstract

Some American newspaper names include the element Blade, as in The Toledo Blade or The Washington Blade. One might assume that all newspaper Blades are the same, but they are, in fact, etymologically distinct, used by namers of their respective newspapers for different reasons. The residues of those etymologies figure in regional and subcultural identities, and Blade reflects various aspects of American history and culture depending on the circumstances of its use. At the finest historical scale, Blade may be a ‘lexical doppelgänger,’ used in mixed communities by immigrant populations for one etymological reason, but by the established Anglo-American strata for another. While purposeful, metaphorical uses of Blade make flamboyant iconic claims about regional or subcultural identity, doppelgänger Blade is forged in the crucible or melting pot of language contact and essentially overlooked in the history of American speech.

Keywords:

• language contact
• etymology
• lexical doppelängers
• Blade
• newspaper names
• Wisconsin newspapers
• The Toledo Blade
• The Washington Blade

Notes

This article originated in a paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Name Society, January 3–5 2013, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

1 There is no complete index of English-language newspapers, not even a putatively complete one. But Blade does not appear as an element in a newspaper name in Crane and Kaye (1927) or Smith and Head (1916) or those newspapers listed in the Library of Congress’ Historic American Newspapers component of its larger project, Chronicling America (<http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers.txt>) (Accessed June 19, 2013).

2 All facts about Wisconsin newspapers in this article derive from Oehlerts (1958), which is organized by county and, within the county listing, by locality and, within the local listing, by newspaper, alphabetically. I focus on Wisconsin Blades here partly (but only partly, as will become clear) because Oehlerts (1958) exists; for many states, comparable information is not available.

3 These two newspapers are listed in the Library of Congress’ Historic American Newspapers archive (see note 1).

4 It should be noted that Rostad was capable of naming a newspaper without a trace of Norwegian influence: he was also founding editor (1892–1895) of The Spring Valley Sun, in Spring Valley, Pierce County, Wisconsin.

5 Proof of this last fact can be found at <http://billiongraves.com/pages/record/ThurstonJRostad/229942> (Accessed June 19, 2013).

6 It is important to distinguish between lexical doppelgängers and words of mixed etymology of the kind often found in Middle English, in which a word might have derived plausibly from either a Latin or an Anglo-French etymon. One salient difference is that speakers or writers of Middle English originating Middle English forms were also usually fluent in Latin and Anglo-French, so that the etymologies in question may have been mixed in the minds of speakers — the mixing is a product of their multilingualism — whereas lexical doppelgängers derive from language contact, speakers do not control both languages implicated in development of the parallel items, and they do not recognize the etymological distinction between the items. The etymologies eventually mix, but only after the social circumstances that gave rise to the parallel items disappears. In other words, etymologies of lexical doppelgängers, unlike those of the Middle English words in question, are not ambiguous but rather clearly distinct and co-existent as such for some period of time.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Adams

Michael Adams teaches English language and literature at Indiana University at Bloomington. He is most recently editor of From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages (Oxford, 2011). He is currently President of the Dictionary Society of North America and Editor of the quarterly journal American Speech.

Correspondence to: Michael Adams, Department of English Language and Literature, Indiana University, 442 Ballantine Hall, 1020 E. Kirkwood Avenue, Bloomington, IN 47405, USA. Email: [email protected]