A Superb Owl
12 February 2023
The NFL championship game is sometimes jocularly referred to as the Superb Owl. Tracing exactly who came up with the coinage is impossible—it was probably independently coined multiple times.
The official name of the game, Super Bowl, was coined in 1966. Officially, the name is two words, but is often written as the closed compound Superbowl. And the first appearances of Superb-owl are as typographical errors at line breaks. The earliest I’ve found of the hyphenation error is in the Arkansas Gazette of 28 September 1977, but undoubtedly earlier examples can be found.
The error is quite common and drew at least one complaint from a would-be copyeditor in North Carolina’s Charlotte Observer on 21 October 1979:
Let’s be honest. Newspapers don’t hyphenate as well as they once did. You’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. Here are a few wallapaloozers plucked out of The Observer by Helen Baker, who works in Observer production:
[…]
Who can forget:
doork-nob
superb-owl
This must stop.
There’s a 1980 example of Superb Owl in a children’s wordplay game that appeared in Rhode Island’s Providence Journal of 6 December 1980:
superb owl Al,ice Eemca
Words Aren’t What They Seem
We want you to play a different kind of word game this week. There’s no contest involved, but we will send Junior Edition t-shirts to those we feel play this game especially well.
The idea is to change the spacing or the pronunciation of certain words. For example, if you read the first two words above, you might think of an owl that is superb. But what you’ve really done is change the spacing on Super Bowl.
In our second two words, you might think we’re telling Al that we want ice, But Alice is the word we started with, while Eemca is simply the way we’d pronounce YMCA if YMCA were a word and not initials.
But jocular use of Superb Owl started to take off in 1999 when the NFL began to crack down on violators of is trademark. An article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of 31 January 1999 documents the phenomenon:
Examples of wildlife crop up all over the zoo that is the National Football League, from the Atlanta Falcons and the Denver Broncos, who are battling tonight in Miami in Super Bowl XXXIII, to the Lions and Dolphins and Eagles.
But before this year, it's a sure bet no one ever heard of the Superb Owls.
Don't look for Superb on any map, though. And don't bother puzzling over the Owls' record or roster.
They existed only briefly as part of a promotion co-sponsored by Rolling Rock beer earlier this month on local radio station WDVE.
Under the law, disc jockeys on the sports and rock 'n' roll station couldn't utter the words "Super Bowl" and "Rolling Rock" in the same breath while promoting a contest giving away free tickets to the big game.
The actual words "Super Bowl" are trademarked by the NFL, which jealously guards their use. And Rolling Rock, as much as some people might like its taste, is not an official NFL sponsor.
So the radio station had to figure out how to do an end-run around this little problem. They called on their listeners to come up with a sneaky way to refer to the Super Bowl.
Among the suggestions were "The Really Big Sporting Thing" and "The HMM-hmm Hmm," said Bob McLaughlin, the station's morning show producer.
But definitely snagging the award for, well, the Super Bowl of suggestions was the listener who advised disc jockeys to sidle one little letter over by a yard.
Let's think about this.
Super Bowl. Superb Owl.
Get it?
And the Superb Owl hit the big time when comedian Stephen Colbert began using it on his Comedy Central television show The Colbert Report, as documented by the Newark Star-Ledger of 31 January 2014:
The NFL has a reputation of protecting its trademarks and copyrights. After Comedy Central’s parent company, Viacom, warned employees against using the term Super Bowl in its programming, Stephen Colbert, host of “The Colbert Report,” began covering the game as “Superb Owl XLVIII.”
Sources:
Oppel, Rich. “Here’s a Problem You Can Solve.” Charlotte Observer (North Carolina), 21 October 1979, 2B. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Royko, Mike. “Mr. Nader Discovers the Sports Fan.” Arkansas Gazette (Little Rock), 28 September 1977, 17A. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Silver, Jonathan D. “NFL to Advertisers: ‘Show Me the Money’ League Jealously Guards Super Bowl Trademark.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania), 31 January 1999, C-1. ProQuest Newspapers.
Stirling, Stephen. “Authorities Seize Counterfeit NFL Merchandise Worth $21.6M.” Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey), 31 January 2014, 6. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
“Words Aren’t What They Seem.” Providence Journal (Rhode Island), 6 December 1980, B-17. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.
Image credit: Dick Daniels, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.