Card sharp versus card shark

[George Thompson]

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.

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African
Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998.