< PREVIOUS ] [ 2007 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >
By now we've read everything about the Colorado Rockies except how they trim their toenails. But there remains a question before this baseball season finally ends:
Why is a player a Rockie
instead of a
Rocky
? The team is named for the Rocky Mountains,
often called the Rockies.
Thus the singular of Rockies
ought to be
Rocky,
but that's just logic, which often has a
remote relationship with English syntax. Rocky
is an
adjective, and so it has no plural. Rockies,
in the
sense of the mountain range, always comes in plural form
and thus has no formal singular.
Some Denver sportswriter doubtless coined Rockie,
but who and when? It may have happened about 30 years
ago.
In 1976, the Kansas City Scouts, a professional hockey team, moved to Denver and changed its name to the Colorado Rockies. I should be able to remember whether an individual skater was called a Rocky or Rockie in print, but I can't.
That's probably because I've never followed ice hockey. Martha grew up in Michigan; she says she enjoyed the sport because she loved the ice and it was great fun to out-skate conceited little boys. But I grew up on the plains of Colorado, where it was hard to find water at all, let alone an expanse of frozen water suitable for skating.
The ice-rink Colorado Rockies became the New Jersey Devils in 1982. When the National Hockey League returned to Colorado in 1995, the Rockies name had been taken by an expansion baseball team, and the Quebec Nordiques became the Colorado Avalanche.
Those teams were named for the mountain range. But how did the mountain range get its name?
Mountain range
is an imprecise term. We use it to
describe all 3,000 miles of Rockies, but we also use it for
smaller stretches: Front Range, Park Range, Gore Range,
Sawatch Range, San Juan Range, to name a few. Some
ranges
are called by other names, like Pikes Peak
Massif, Arkansas Hills or Wet Mountains.
The Spanish did not apply one name to the whole stretch
from Canada into Mexico. In his 1779 campaign into the
mountains, Juan Bautista de Anza referred to our San Juans
as the Sierra de la Grulla
(Mountains of the
Cranes). The Pikes Peak massif is Sierra del Almagre
(Mountains of the Red Earth); he also has Lost Hills and a
medium-sized sierra.
Perhaps the Spanish, coming from the south, did not think that these mountains were any rockier than the others they had encountered.
Coming 27 years later, American Lt. Zebulon M. Pike
referred to the Mexican mountains
visible from the
Great Plains. That's as close as Pike came to naming the
whole bunch. Otherwise he has White Mountains,
Blue Mountains
and the Great Peak.
According to the book Mountain Names
by Robert
Hixson Julyan, the Rocky Mountains were named by French
trappers and traders, who were accustomed to rounded,
forest-clad mountains
in the East. They translated the
Cree word for the mountains to the west into les
montaignes rocheuse, 'the Rocky Mountains.'
A 1730 French map had them as the Montaignes de Pierres
Brilliantes, mountains of bright stones,
which led
to some American use of my favorite name, Shining
Mountains.
But by 1752, Montaignes de Roche, or
Rocky Mountains,
was the common French name, and
apparently the Americans, coming from the same direction,
picked up on it. Sometimes it was translated as Stony
Mountains, the term Thomas Jefferson used.
If history had taken a slightly different twist, Colorado would be home to the Shining Mountains or the Stony Mountains, the Denver baseball team might be the Colorado Stonies or Shinies, and some sports editor would have decreed whether a player was a Shiny or Shinie or Shiner, a Stony or Stonie or Stoner. Given those choices, Rockie is tolerable, even if it looks like a misspelling.
< PREVIOUS ] [ 2007 Index ] [ Ed Quillen HOME ] [ SEARCH ] [ NEXT >