What’s in a name? It’s generally one of the first things we learn about a new person, place or thing. We need to know how to refer to it. And we’ll probably not bat an eye over 99 names in 100. But every so often something happens to a name that makes it problematic and a name change is the only way to save the day.
10. The World Taekwondo Foundation Had To Change Their Name Thanks to the Internet
Are you into martial arts at all? If so, you may know World Taekwondo. That’s the official name of the World Taekwondo Federation. But now you might be thinking, if it’s the World Taekwondo Federation, why is it called World Taekwondo? Well, thank the world of today and its penchants for abbreviations, acronyms, and salty language.
Even though the World Taekwondo Federation was established in 1973, they made the switch in 2017 thanks to the fact that their initials, WTF, had come to take on a decidedly different meaning in the world at large. The organization was at a loss to try to overcome the negative associations with those three particular letters and rather than use their fighting skills in a battle they couldn’t win, they just dropped the F.
Suffering the same fate a few years earlier was Wisconsin’s Tourism Federation who realized in 2009, after 30 years in business, that the internet can never be defeated. They became the Tourism Federation of Wisconsin.
9. MRI Used To Be NMRI But The N Stood For Nuclear
Have you ever had an MRI at a hospital? They perform roughly 30 million of them a year. And that high number is due in some small part to a public relations move back in the day when they changed the machine’s name.
When the technology first appeared it was called Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Imaging and man, people did not like that. The technology was developed through the ’30s and first implemented in the 1940s before becoming widespread in the ’70s at the height of a time when no one wanted to get near anything named nuclear at all.
Ironically, the name comes from how atomic nuclei interact in the presence of a magnetic field at a certain resonance frequency and wasn’t related to the nuclear everyone was afraid. Still, to keep people at ease, they dropped the nuclear part.
8. Canola Oil Used to be Rapeseed Oil
Canada produced 12.6 million metric tons of canola oil in 2021. It’s one of the most popular cooking oils in the world and you can find it pretty much everywhere. When it first arrived on the scene, however, it had a different name.
There is no canola plant. The name comes from an amalgamation of the terms “Canadian oil” and “low acid.” The name used to be rapeseed oil. And you probably don’t need to be told why the name rapeseed oil was viewed as problematic. So in 1989 it was changed to canola.
Rapeseed gets its name from Latin. Rapum is the Latin word for turnip and rapeseed is in the same family. The horrible connotations were mostly innocent enough, but few people wanted to mount a PR campaign to try to salvage the innocent usage of the word. That said, some people were still behind it for a long time, like the town of Tisdale, Saskatchewan where huge crops of rapeseed are grown. If you happened to be driving towards the town you could run across harrowing signs that read “Tisdale: Land of Rape and Honey” until about 2016.
7. Jays Potato Chips used to be called Mrs. Japp’s
Jays Foods has been around since 1927. The company was started by a man named Leonard Japp and originally they sold pretzels. This expanded to other foods and eventually came to include potato chips. In 1940, Mrs. Japp’s Potato Chips hit the market. One year later, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and anti-Japanese sentiment was at an all time high in America.
Leonard Japp’s unfortunate last name was identical in pronunciation to a popular racial slur against the Japanese. The chips were pulled from shelves across the nation for no other reason than the name and people associating them with the Asian nation.
Rather than try to fight against both prejudice and misunderstanding, Japp opted to rebrand calling the new company Jays because it started with a J and was available to use at the time.
6. The Cincinnati Reds Changed Their Name to the Redlegs
During the Cold War, nothing seemed to be more terrifying to a person stateside than being near a communist. The very idea of the Red Menace was enough to run people out of Hollywood and ruin lives. Even today you can readily see people using the word “communism” with the same vitriol as some of our more popular curse words.
This anti-Soviet hatred became an issue for professional baseball back in the 1950s. The Cincinnati Reds were founded back in 1869 and were actually the first professional baseball team in America. Back then they were the Red Stockings. By 1881 they were just the Reds when they switched from the National League to the American Association and the name stayed for decades. Then came 1953.
McCarthyism was peaking, the Korean War was underway, and Communism was the great boogeyman of the world. The Reds needed to distance themselves from their name and Redlegs was a nickname they’d had for years, so they adopted it formally until 1959. They just used the “C” for a couple of years and, in 1961, the Reds were back.
5. Jaguar Used to be SS Cars
You don’t see a ton of Jaguar cars on the roads these days and the company has never been as big as Ford or Toyota. Jaguar Land Rover makes both luxury cars and SUVs and the Land Rover model seems to be a bit better known. A 2023 Jaguar F-Type starts at around $74,000. That said, the company may not exist at all had it not been for a strategic name change.
When Jaguar started it was actually the Swallow Sidecar company back in the 1920s. They made sidecars, so it made sense. But it was kind of a long name for a car company so people started abbreviating it. Plus, the company itself was known for just using their own initials on the front grille of cars they produced. So they all had SS on them. You can see where this is going.
Throughout the 1930s it became more and more obvious that SS cars were a bad idea thanks to the Nazi Schutzstaffel. The company dropped the initials in 1936 and by 1945 they were officially just Jaguar Cars Limited.
4. The Canadian Town of Val-des-Sources Used to be Asbestos
There are a handful of towns in the world that are just very unfortunately named. Some are vaguely offensive, some goofy, and some like the town of Val-des-Sources in Quebec were just too closely associated with death and despair.
Val-des-Sources wasn’t always known by that name, it was only changed in 2020. Prior to that, the small French-Canadian town of 7,000 people was known as Asbestos. Nothing like naming your town after one of the few products in the world synonymous with deadly cancer.
The town came by the name Asbestos honestly; it was actually home to the world’s largest asbestos mine. They’d had the deadly moniker since the 19th century. Back then it obviously didn’t have the same negative connotations.
As time passed, the town held onto the name even as asbestos was banished from pretty much everywhere. However, the town was suffering in a business sense thanks to foreign investors not wanting to go into business with such an ominously named place.
The town held a vote on a new name and Val-des-Sources, meaning Valley of the Springs, won with 51%.
3. Biggby Coffee Used to Be Beaners
Coffee is made from beans so, in principle, it’s not hard to see how a company that sells coffee might stumble upon the name of Beaners in an effort to brand themselves. That was the case with Biggby Coffee when they first appeared on the scene back in 1995.
By the year 2007 the company had grown to 77 locations and was expanding rapidly. Today they have nearly 300 in operation. But as they grew larger and more people took notice of them, the company also began to field criticisms from the public over their name. Though owners Bob Fish and Mary Roszel claimed to have not been familiar with it at all and meant no insult to anyone, the word “beaner” had, at that time, an established history of being a racial slur against Hispanics.
The company realized the name was not projecting the image they had intended. They felt like if they didn’t change it, even if they meant no harm, they’d be condoning its use so in 2007 they changed all of their existing stores and rebranded as Biggby, keeping the “B” logo from the original store but losing the name entirely.
2. The Washington Wizards used to be the Bullets
The Washington Wizards have been playing in the NBA since 1997. The franchise history is longer, however, starting in Chicago as the Packers all the way back in 1961 and then moving to Baltimore in 1963 when they became the Bullets. The team held the Bullets name through a 1973 move to Washington, where they played first as the Capital Bullets and then later as the Washington Bullets, starting in 1974. So what made them change from the Bullets after more than 30 years? Two things.
First, in 1995, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. He was a friend of the Bullets’ then-owner Abe Pollin. Pollin made the name change announcement four days after his friend’s funeral.
More pertinent to the people of Washington was the fact that, at that time, Washington was known as one of the most violent cities in the entire country. Gun violence was rampant and Pollin acknowledged that the idea of their team being “faster than a speeding bullet” meant something else in that climate.
Fans were not particularly happy at the time, though that was to be expected. Nevertheless, they were allowed to vote on five potential new names, and Wizards won out.
1. The Royal Family Took on the Name House of Windsor Over Saxe-Coburg-Gotha
It’s a little difficult to keep track of all the names and titles used by people in the Royal Family but the reigning family come from the House of Windsor. They took over from the House of Hanover back in 1901. Except, if you check the history, you’ll see that the House of Hanover was officially succeeded by the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.
It was in 1917 when King George officially ordered Royals to dispense with German names. Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was dropped and Windsor, a name prominent in British society with ties to royalty going back years, was chosen.
Anti-German sentiment had been on the rise and, of course, the First World War cemented people’s feelings. The final straw seemed to be an air raid that took place on June 13, 1917. Germans bombed a school in London’s east end and killed 18 children. The raid was conducted with Gotha bombers. It was just over a month later when Windsor became the official name.