Let’s look at the hell that is choosing a name for your band.
[This was my weekly column for GlobalNews.ca. – AC]
In 2007, a couple of listeners asked me if I would do another Ongoing History of New Music program on the origins of band names. I’d done a few in the past, but I was happy to accommodate.
This time, however, I was struck with a question: What do you call the study of the names musical groups choose? In the decades since the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, someone must have come up with a term.
As it turns out, no. The study of word origins is etymology. If you’re looking at place names — known as toponyms — then you’re into toponomy, toponymics or toponomastics. We get a little closer with the word for the study of personal names, which is onomastics or anthroponymy — unless you’re just concerned with surnames, which is patronymics. But, much to my surprise, there was no official term for “how did a band get their name?”
This struck me as a massive oversight in the field of linguistics, so I called up a few academics, who then roped in other language experts, including a branding and marketing guy in California who had coined the terms Swiffer and Blackberry. They returned with a suggestion: bandomynology.
Since then, I’ve been on a mission to see that the word spreads into the common vernacular so that one day, it’ll end up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Disappointingly, the OED people still haven’t called despite my best efforts, including a column in this space in 2021. The Urban Dictionary, however, has been most kind by adding bandomynology to its list of searchable words.
It’s again time to put the word out there with a little more bandomynology.
