What Happens When the Blue Hens Face the Gamecocks?

Friday is the 83rd anniversary of the University of Delaware inventing the "junior year abroad." Anyone who has ever been to Delaware knows you're pretty much abroad if you drive for 30 minutes in any direction, so it's little surprise that the Fighting Blue Hens (team motto: "look out! we have eggs and we're angry!") took the lead in having its students learn elsewhere. What else would you expect from people who can't even pronounce Newark correctly.

The hard part, of course, was coming up with a name for this experiment in education. In 1923 many of U of D's students were legacies, so actually it was called "Junior's year" originally, but then women insisted on going to college and that complicated everything, not to mention leading to many more Juniors. The "abroad" part also had to change then, since it was called "a-dame," but that only really fit when students went to England, and now students were going to France (insert your own joke as they went to the Sorbonne--oops, I beat you to it) and "a-femme" sounds like you're clearing your throat and can't quite talk well, which is probably why you're clearing your throat.

Actually, it's best the U of D got to name the program. It's rumored that the University of Texas wanted to call it "A Spell Over Yonder," which at least is better than NYU's "Why the Fuck Do You Wanna Leave Manhattan?"