I still don’t know whether or not the Duderstadt Center should be nicknamed “The Dude.” I don’t know the guy. But the whole debate – if it can be called that – reminds of me of something I do have an opinion about….
Even before Comerica Park first opened, a lot of Detroiters started calling it “Copa”. It’s natural for people to give their own nicknames to something they feel strongly about. It can makes something local seem like it really belongs to us. (Even something distinctly non-local, like Buffalo Wild Wings – aka “B-Dub’s”.) It wasn’t long before Detroit media outlets began using the nickname that the populace they’re supposed to serve had popularized.
But some people weren’t happy about the nicknaming of the ballpark, especially the people at Comerica, the corporation who had paid $66 million for naming rights to the park for 30 years. I can’t find the sources on this, but I seem to remember that Comerica actually sent some sort of letter to the papers and TV stations saying, in effect, “we paid a lot of money for this, so please use the full name ‘Comerica Park’ when referring to that place….” (What’s certain is that Comerica – aware of the potential backlash from die-hard Detroit fans against corporate-sounding names for Tiger Stadium’s replacement – went on what the Dallas Morning News called a “charm offensive”.)
At the time, I was tickled in that special place where linguists can be tickled by the hubris of what I thought was a futile attempt by a corporation to combat the natural force of language.
But I was wrong. Soon the papers stopped using the shortened nickname, and eventually it fell out of the wider use it had enjoyed in the beginning. It’s true that some fans never liked the nickname and campaigned against it on their own. But I think that the decisive factor in the declining usage of “Copa” was Comerica’s campaign and the Detroit media’s unsurprising obedience to corporate interests.
Now’s where it gets interesting. Recently Comerica delivered a blow to Detroit and the rest of the state by announcing plans to relocate its headquarters to Texas. The Grand Rapids Press’s Nancy Crawley sums it up best:
The angry reaction from civic leaders and average people around the state made it clear this was more than a business decision in their eyes. It was a repudiation of the Detroit auto industry, its Midwest suppliers and Michigan as a builder of wealth. The board, in effect, said ‘Who cares if we have been based here for nearly 150 years? We’re moving our headquarters where the population and economy are booming.’
Here’s what the “Community Involvement” section of Comerica’s website still says about Comerica Park:
“We see this as a great opportunity to associate the Comerica name with the hallowed traditions of baseball and the Detroit Tigers,” said Gene Miller, former chairman of Comerica. “The message is clear: Detroit is a great long-term investment.”
I think that it’s time to start reviving the old nickname “Copa” for Comerica Park. Journalists here in Michigan should atone and show their disapproval of Comerica’s move by using “Copa” every chance they get. And ordinary people should stop policing themselves and let their language show the symbolic power it can have against the attempts of corporations to control it. Maybe Comerica will sell off the naming rights to the ballpark and this will all be for naught. And maybe you find the politics of language uncompelling. In any case, it takes one third the amount of syllables to say “Copa” than it does to say “Comerica Park”. For the sake of brevity, if anything, please – let’s call it “Copa” again.
