Before I worked for The Daily Evergreen, I did running start at Bellevue College (then Bellevue Community College) and was the news editor for their paper, The Jibsheet.

This newspaper’s name was a pun on the fact that BCC’s mascot was the Vikings, since a jibsheet is part of a sailing ship. Unsurprisingly, most people did not possess the levels of historical sailing knowledge required to understand this name.

Then the school took a vote to change the mascot and suddenly our already confusing name made even less sense, and we ended up changing the name of the paper to The Watchdog.

The whole debacle got me thinking – what does a mascot mean? And this question came up again as I face graduation in less than a month.

The concept of a mascot has been around for a really long time, and derives from a French word meaning ‘lucky charm,’ according to the International University Sports Federation (FISU). The French got the word from an even older word meaning ‘charm’ or ‘amulet,’ which was a diminutive form of the word ‘witch.’

So are mascots witchcraft? Linguistically speaking, sort of.

The origins of animals representing certain sports teams goes back a long ways. Initially the mascot was a live animal, usually a predator, to strike fear into the hearts of the opposition and entertain the crowds. WSU’s last live mascot, Butch VI, died in 1978. According to FISU, it wasn’t until the popularization of the Muppets in the 60s that the idea to make cute, fluffy mascots really became marketable.

So if mascots were initially meant to be frightening, I can only conclude that in the days before stuffed animals, the Civil War between Oregon State University and the University of Oregon would have been the least intimidating football game ever – nobody is going to be very intimidated by a beaver slapping its tail, or by a duck quacking indignantly.

The history of these names is more interesting than I at first suspected. The Oregon Ducks were initially called the Webfooters after a band of anglers who allegedly rescued George Washington in 1776. Eventually in 1920s, the Webfooters gave way to Paddles the Duck, a nickname that will strike fear in the hearts of many. But not before the Oregon Ducks tried out the mascot Beavers first.

Nobody quite knows when or why the Beavers became the OSU mascot, but back in the early days of the late 1800s they were the Coyotes – this would have probably been more effective at scaring enemies at a sporting event than a beaver.

WSU adopted the Cougar as its mascot in 1919, but it wasn’t until almost a decade later that we had a real animal to go with it. The first live mascot appeared in 1927 when then-Governor gave the school a cougar cub that was named Butch after the star of the team. Butch was replaced every time the animal died until the sixth living mascot passed away and WSU embraced costumes and toys.

I’m sure every university has cute or funny stories tied to the history of their mascots. Maybe it’s my sentimental retrospective as I’m about to graduate, but I’m pretty sure ours is the best.