Quote:
Originally Posted by 954Stealth
Who knows why they're called Red Sox and not Red Socks?
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No? ok..
The first Publix was a failed theater in Florida owned by Paramount-Publix, Corp. It's what we now call Paramount. It was Publix theater and used to be the primary competitor to Loew's Theatres.
The name came at a time when Teddy Roosevelt thought the English language should be simplified. Though Congress didn't like Teddy's idea, Andrew Carnegie agreed. He started a Simplified Spelling Board in 1906. The idea was to make English simpler - omitting silent letters and making it sound more phonetically aligned - so the world would adopt English as the primary language. For example, 'Eau' was changed to just 'O'.
Marketing folks caught on and translated that to names of companies, flashy newpaper headers, sports. So one of the simplifications was 'cks' becoming 'X' hence Red Sox, White Sox and Publix.
You can read more about the changes here (some actually stuck and some failed to catch on)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board