Canadian university’s new team name produces typography jokes

In 2021, Toronto’s Ryerson University announced it would change its name to Toronto Metropolitan University following widespread protests about its name. The school (initially founded in 1948 as Ryerson Technical Institute) was initially named for Canadian educator Egerton Ryerson, but that name had drawn fire for a while given Ryerson’s writings’ influence on the establishment of the Canadian residential school system for First Nations children.

In addition to the overall school name change, the school has also decided to change its name and mascot for its athletics teams. Those teams, formerly known as the Ryerson Rams, compete in U SPORTS, the highest level of post-secondary competition in Canada.  The school announced Monday they’ve picked “The TMU Bold,” and they’ll have a new falcon mascot. (They will still keep the gold and blue colours, though.) Here’s that announcement:

A new era starts today 💙💛

You can call us TMU Bold.
Our new mascot will be a falcon.

Today is all about our identity, but stay tuned for the launch of our new Bold logo in the weeks ahead.#TMUbold pic.twitter.com/GfbGQEWGWh

— TMU Bold (@tmubold) August 29, 2022

“Bold,” however, carries a lot of connotations of typography’s textual emphasis through font-weight modification, or the “Bold” command found in word-processing software, content management systems, and HTML tags. And that led to a lot of jokes along those lines:

There's no way TMU Bold isn't the name of a font https://t.co/8lFnqXhxfC

— Jaden Ho (@jadenho_) August 29, 2022

@TorontoMet was it really necessary to change the Rams name? Really TMU Bold was the best you could come up with? Was TMU Italics the runner up? Just an embarrassment of an institution.

— Michael Rosada (@RosadaMichael) August 29, 2022

Trying to start a trend of naming university teams after typographical emphases.

"Tonight, at Varsity Arena, the U of T Underlines take on the York Subscripts, for the right to play for the championship against the TMU Bold." https://t.co/ySC3N9cm5y

— Jonathan Wilbiks (@Wilbix) August 29, 2022

will TMU bold be available on adobe fonts? https://t.co/AoKRXb1pES

— nico canavo (@nicocanavo) August 29, 2022

For a joke along different lines, though, Ben Waldman had a good line about the school picking the wrong feathered mascot:

hey @TorontoMet major missed opportunity: you should have made the mascot the Bold Eagle. pic.twitter.com/ff5BVqD0va

— Ben Waldman (@BenjWaldman) August 29, 2022

The Bold at least does have the advantage of seemingly not being a name or nickname used by any other sports team. At least, Bold is not listed in the extremely extensive Wiktionary appendix “English names of sports teams.” So there’s some market differentiation.

And while there isn’t a Bold logo outlet, at least the university logo seen at the top (used on the athletics department page for this announcement; the URL there is still “ryersonrams.ca,” but that will presumably be changing soon) looks to be in a bold emphasis. It would have been unfortunate if they went with Bold if the university logo was italicized or underlined.

And there are perhaps potential partnerships out there, maybe for a “Bold roast” with one of the numerous coffee chains set up in Toronto, or with any number of the companies that have used “bold” in advertising campaigns (including Cadillac, Tecate, and Guinness, but not Crypto.com, which instead went with “Fortune favors the brave“). And in the end, this will probably go back to not being noticed by many. But at least it led to some good typography jokes. And maybe we’ll get a “Fortune favors the bold!” play-by-play call on a win someday.

[AthleticsTMU on Twitter, ryersonrams.ca]