Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Enterprises, be they businesses, nonprofit organizations, or organized events, need memorable names to differentiate themselves from other enterprises. In the United States, geographical panhandles have provided a distinguishing word around which to build an enterprise name that appeals to people having affection for or a connection to a particular panhandle. This essay seeks to uncover the extent of the panhandle-naming phenomenon, trace panhandle namegiving back through time, and create a corpus of panhandle-named enterprises. Data collection tools involved standard online searches; Google’s predictive searching algorithm; business and nonprofit searching tools on the websites of the states’ secretaries of state; and several subscription databases, including Newspapers.com. Florida’s panhandle has inspired, thus far, more than 2,400 panhandle-named enterprises, with Texas coming in second, at 1,600. Four other states turned up with more than two hundred each: Idaho, West Virginia, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. In total, the research yielded a from-scratch corpus of just over 6,200 panhandle-named enterprises.
Source: Names
Author: Michael D. Sublett
Institution: Illinois State University
Language: English
Subfield: Language and Linguistics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: University of Pittsburgh
OpenAlex ID: W4411331262