What might have been

People, places and things nearly named something else entirely

March 11, 2013|By Rob Manker, Chicago Tribune reporter

When it was revealed last week that the iPhone was almost named the "TelePod," the "Mobi" or the "TriPod" instead, it got us thinking about what else — or who else — was very nearly called something else entirely. Imagine, if things had gone just a little differently ...

A tale of 2 names

Portland, Ore., was almost named Boston, Ore. The two New England settlers who established the town were from cities by those names, Boston, Mass., and Portland, Maine. They flipped a coin, and Portland won. Probably a good thing, too. While IFC's "Portlandia" rolls right off the tongue, "Bostonia" just wouldn't be the same.

Inconsequential meaning

When Twitter founders were determining a name for their new microblogging service, they sought a moniker that conveyed how a phone would react when receiving one of their messages — it would Jitter or Twitch. Not liking the sort of imagery those names conveyed, they sat down with the dictionary and found the word Twitter, which co-founder Jack Dorsey has said was perfect with its meaning of short, inconsequential bursts of information.

No, that's not right

Bieber Fever would likely afflict many teens and tweens just the same, regardless his first name. But pop star Justin Bieber almost wasn't Justin at all. "I called him Jesse the whole pregnancy," his mother, Pattie Mallette, told NBC last year. "And then, once he was born, I was like, 'No, he doesn't look like a Jesse."

They were the what?

If not for an outcry by fans in 1959, today's backers of the NFL franchise in Oakland, Calif., might still be rooting for the Senors rather than the Raiders. The former was announced as the winner in a "name the team" contest rigged by team co-owner Chet Soda, an Oakland city councilman. Soda was well known in Oakland for calling acquaintances "senor," but fans objected to that as the team name and the contest's actual winner, Raiders, was used instead.

OK, let's go with that

The chocolaty drink known as Ovaltine is known by a different name in some other countries and would be called Ovomaltine here too if not for a clerical error introduced when its manufacturer registered the name.

This time, for sure

Hannah might still be a Montana, and Joe a Montana too. But the state with which they share a name might have been called Jefferson or Douglas instead. Rep. James Ashley of Ohio liked the Montana name so much, he'd previously tried to use it for what would be the neighboring state of Idaho. Fellow Rep. Samuel Cox, also of Ohio, suggested Jefferson, after the third U.S. president, or Douglas, after Sen. Stephen Douglas of Illinois. Eventually, the Committee on Territories settled on Montana, derived from Spanish for "mountainous territory."

The winner, by a nose

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was actually supposed to be Rollo. Copywriter Robert May of Chicago-based Montgomery Ward wrote the original poem about the reindeer, with Rollo as its name. Ward's executives didn't like the name, nor were they fond of his second choice, Reginald. It was May's 4-year-old daughter who came up with the eventual Rudolph to describe Santa's lead reindeer, the one with the very shiny nose.

Uh, no, Walt

Walt Disney's now-omnipresent Mickey Mouse has always had those same initials, but Disney originally envisioned the cheery rodent with a different first name back in 1928 — Mortimer. Disney's wife, Lilly, didn't like the name, preferring Mickey instead. "Mortimer is a horrible name for a mouse!" she said. And the rest, as they say, is history.


Twitter: @RobManker

Sources: The Atlantic; "Oakland Raiders: Colorful Tales of the Silver and Black" By Tom LaMarre; "Montana: A History of Two Centuries," by Michael Peter Malone, Richard B. Roeder, William L. Lang; "The New York Public Library Amazing U.S. Geography," by Andrea Sutcliffe; "Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things," by Charles Panati; "The World's Greatest Book of Useless Information," by Noel Botham; "Walt Before Mickey: Disney's Early Years, 1919-1928," by Timothy S. Susanin.