Card sharp versus card shark

[Mark A Mandel]

On Mon, 24 Feb 2003, George Thompson wrote:

#Laurence Horns writes: No teams named "the Whites" or "the Blacks" as far as I
#> know.  Or "the Pink(s)" or "the Yellow(s)"--although my undergraduate
#> college's teams were the Yellowjackets and the school color Dandelion
#> Yellow.  Dartmouth is "Big Green", Cornell "Big Red", Syracuse "the
#> Orangemen" and of course Harvard "the Crimson".
#
#The NYU sports teams were long known as "The Violets", after flowers
#that grew at its Bronx campus.  This, I think, was considered
#unsatisfactory, but it was not until the Bobst Library named its
#on-line catalog "BobCat" -- "Bobst" and "Catalog" -- get it? that the
#men's teams started calling themselves the "Bobcats", with a fuzzy,
#cuddly bobcat leading cheers from the sidelines.  The women's teams, I
#believe, still answer the the name "Violets", no doubt thinking that
#it is more ignominious for an sports team to be named after a library
#catalog than after a spring flower.

My wife and I attended CCNY, as had my father. I must be one of the very
few of my class who actually knew the college song, having sung along
with Dad in the car: "Lavender, My Lavender". CCNY's teams are the
Lavenders (plural), and AFAIK still are. The team colors are lavender
and black, which looks like what we call "black and blue". And when they
played NYU it was the Lavenders vs. the Violets.

-- Mark A. Mandel ('73)