The Edmonton Football Team will now be known as the Edmonton Elks!
I’m not sure if this will settle the nerves of those that NEED pure and correct grammar. But I hope this helps some people.
Why is it not the Edmonton Elk? As opposed to the Edmonton Elks…
According to Merriam-Webster, In the early days of professional sports. Sportswriters liked to add a splash of colour to their depictions of the teams they were talking about. The official names of teams didn’t include nicknames (like Cubs or Orioles). You simply had organizations named accordingly to their home cities. ‘The New York Baseball Club,” “The Chicago Baseball Club of the American League,” and so on.
The Minnesota NBA team is called the Timberwolves, with the second half of the name using the standard plural form of wolf. Each player on the team is theoretically a Timberwolf. Meanwhile, the NHL team in Toronto is called the Maple Leafs, naming themselves after the symbol on the Canadian flag. Each player is a Maple Leaf. The spelling of the team name follows its own grammatical logic, however, since the noun leaf, of course, is normally pluralized as leaves. So why aren’t they the Toronto Maple Leaves?
SO, why is the new Edmonton football Club known as the Elks and not Elk?
Merriam-Webster goes on to say that we tend to treat certain words with their own grammatical rule when they drift far in meaning from their component terms. In other words: “Toronto Maple Leafs” you aren’t pluralizing the foliage of a maple tree, you’re pluralizing hockey players.
Much like the Edmonton Elks. You aren’t pluralizing the animal as if they are in a field somewhere. You are just pluralizing the players on a team.
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