Team color names [WAS: Card sharp versus card shark]

[Laurence Horn]

At 5:20 PM -0500 2/25/03, James A. Landau wrote:
>
>If the Washington Redskins give in to political correctness, they have a
>widely-used nickname they can officially adopt: "the Hogs".
>
>Oink.  I hope they don't.
>

I'm pretty sure "the Hogs" was never a nickname for the whole Redskin
team, but for their very large offensive line.  Back in the same era
when that was adopted (and the fans came to games with hog-masks on),
which was I believe in the late '80s when they were a perennial
playoff contender and won one Super Bowl decisively against the
Broncos), the wide receivers, who were short and fast, were known as
"the Smurfs."  But neither of these nicknames referred to the team as
a whole, the way the sobriquet, "The Over-the-Hill Gang", applied to
an earlier long-in-the-tooth Redskin squad in toto.  Rather, "the
Hogs" is part of a long tradition of names for units within football
teams, ranging from "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse" (Notre Dame
backfield, before my time) and "The Seven Blocks of Granite" (Fordham
defense, 30's?) to the various defensive teams or units mostly from
the 70's: the "Orange Crush" (Denver), the "Purple People Eaters"
(Vikings), the "Fearsome Foursome" (L. A. Rams), and so on.  None of
these were ever applied metonymically to the whole team in question,
as far as I know.

larry