Outside his name

[Laurence Horn]

At 8:48 PM -0500 12/5/07, Joel S. Berson wrote:
>At 12/5/2007 06:39 PM, Alice Faber wrote:
>>I'm surprised Larry didn't already post this, but there you are. This
>>morning (12/5/07) on Mike and Mike in the Morning (ESPN radio), they had
>>a segment with a new football analyst, a recently retired paper. One of
>>the topics of discussion was the incident late in the Monday night
>>Patriots-Ravens game, in which Ravens players allege that an on-field
>>official repeatedly addressed one of them as "boy". (Both player and
>>official are African-American.) The new analyst, Marcellus Wiley, an LA
>>native who played at Columbia University
>
>That's "Columbia College", Alice.  The university does not have
>athletic teams.  (And if you sense some parochialism here, I'm sure
>any Harvard College graduate would make the same comment.  What do
>they say at New Haven's Yale?)
>
>>  prior to his 10-year NFL career
>>(as this was his first appearance, he started by discussing his CV),
>
>Did he really refer to his team as "Columbia University"??  If so,
>his CV is fraudulent!  :-)
>
I think he said Columbia, but since Columbia College is at Columbia
University I think transitivity would apply and predict that both
uses are possible.  Besides, my alma maters, the University of
Rochester and UCLA, fielded athletic teams that went by those
non-"collegiate" designations.  Maybe it's sloppy usage, but
certainly this distinction is not made all that consistently (except
perhaps at Columbia).  Here, the team is usually called "the Yale
Bulldogs", "the Blue", "the Elis", etc., not Yale College or Yale
University.  The Yale College Dean is not the Yale University Dean,
but that's a different matter.

LH

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