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Over the course of years, Snopes has received messages about South Carolina's Furman University supposedly changing the name of its mascot to avoid an offensive acronym. For instance, in July 2003, we collected the following email: Two years later, we heard: Then, in 2008, someone emailed Snopes: A common form of joke and urban legend (and occasional true story) involves the business, school, or other organization that has to change an established multi-word name after discovering its initials form an embarrassing word or phrase. One of my father's oft-repeated jokes had to do with a putative institute of higher education supposedly once known as the Sam Houston Institute of Technology, but the example of that ilk we see most often these days is the above-quoted anecdote about Furman University. Furman is a private university located in Greenville, South Carolina. It was founded as Furman College in 1826 before being chartered as Furman University in 1850. According to legend, sometime in 1850 (or later), the revelation that the combined names of the school and its mascot (the Christian Knight) formed a rather unseemly acronym, necessitating a change in the latter: Henceforth, the school's mascot and sports teams would use the name Paladin. This tale seems superficially plausible: Furman began as a Men's Academy and Theological Institute, the school was founded by (and formerly associated with) the South Carolina Baptist Convention, the university's motto is Christo et Doctrinae (For Christ and Learning), and the team's mascot (a paladin) is depicted as a mounted knight. All things considered, it doesn't seem much of a stretch to believe that Furman's mascot was once supposedly known as a Christian knight, and the incongruousness of a Christian school's alleged association with such a vulgar acronym makes this version of the legend a particularly striking one. As usual, however, the salacious legend crashes to bits when it collides with mundane reality. According to Furman University's website, all the school's sports teams did not adopt the name Paladins until 1961; prior to that, different sports teams used different names (none of them Christian Knights): Furman University's official athletic mascot is a knight on a horse and the school's intercollegiate athletic teams are nicknamed Paladins. Prior to 1961, this was not the case as the baseball team was known as the Hornets, the football team the Hurricane, and the basketball team the Paladins. First used by a Greenville sportswriter in the 1930s to describe Furman's basketball team, Paladins became the official nickname of all intercollegiate athletic teams at the school following a vote of the student body on Sept. 15, 1961. Newspaper accounts bear this out: News reports chronicling the efforts of Furman's various athletic teams include references to Hornets, Hurricanes, and Paladins — but not Christian Knights. Not surprisingly, many people have heard similar stories about schools in their areas:
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