What's in a name, anyway?
If you're the state of Arizona, the answer apparently is "not much."
According to the "Hate your name? It's an easy fix in Arizona" story in The Arizona Republic Monday, this state has some of the most lenient laws on name changes. According to two Maricopa County Superior Court commissioners, about 99 percent of the name-change requests they hear are granted.
Upon reading this, we at The State Press all asked each other the same question: "Is The Arizona Republic hurting for story ideas even more than we are?"
But after our initial confusion wore off, we really started thinking about this name change thing. And let's be honest: There are a lot of people around ASU who would make our jobs a lot easier if they would just change their names:
-Michael Crow. Do you have any idea how hard it is to write headlines when the ASU president shares his surname with a common winged animal? "Crow flies to Mexico" sounds like some kind of special-interest nature story, and "Crow speaks at MU" is downright nonsensical. He'd relieve a lot of our stress by adding an 'e' to the end of his name, like the Australian megastar Russell Crowe. Besides, he's already got the Master and Commander thing down pat.
-Milton Glick. This one's easy. Who can resist the comparison between the ASU provost and the hilariously overweight Comedy Central talk show host? Milton should just change his first name to Jiminy and get it over with. "Prime Time Glick," indeed.
-Charles Backus. The outgoing ASU East provost's name is a little too similar to that of former ASU professor Ralph Backhaus, who went from manufacturing Ecstasy in a campus laboratory to manufacturing license plates in an Arizona prison. If we were Chuck, we'd want to steer clear of that association. (The same goes for anyone whose name sounds like "Clayton Prepsky.")
-Dirk Koetter. Try "Dirk Please-Don't-Fire-Me." (Sorry, that was just too easy.)
Now that we think of it, maybe The State Press could use a new name. Unfortunately, we ran a quick Google search and found out most of the cool names like "The Wall Street Journal" and "The Boston Globe" were already taken. So much for improving our circulation.
But maybe it'd be better to pick something that describes our newspaper. For those of you who don't know, we publish out of the Matthews Center basement, so perhaps "The Daily Dungeon" would be more apropos. That, or "The Cockroach Courier."
Whatever we call ourselves, it's important to remember that it's what's inside that matters.
So the next time you think about making fun of a "McWheener" or a "Butkus," maybe instead you should politely suggest they head down to the courthouse and get a much cooler name.
"Gbaja-Biamila" comes to mind. (Props to the four Green Bay Packers fans who got that joke.)
