Some people who know me (and many more only know me) know about my screenname Bevo82 or BevoBevans. Now I will reveal to you why I have these names. (Gasp!) I know, I know - I should really be trademarking these names or selling the rights, but I'm a nice guy and believe in an open, free society. :)
The "82" is simple: I was born in 1982.
The "Bevans" comes from when my mother called me "Evans-Bevans" as a kid. Ok, ok - she still does sometimes.
And now for the Bevo - the short answer is it's the name of the Texas Longhorns Mascot (I was born and raised in Austin, TX, and my Dad went and taught law there at UT... it was years later when my sister Lea went to Tampa that I woefully admitted the original "UT" was the University of Tampa, not Texas or Tennessee - which has the uglier orange, and many of my friends who are TN Vol fans would agree - and if you go to ut.edu you will notice it's Tampa, not Austin, which is utexas.edu. OK - random asides are OVER!)
But for the long answer for how on earth Bevo was named, I refer to the ever-prescient Wikipedia Article on Bevo, and this passage in particular:
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Origin of the name Bevo
"Bo" made his first public appearance at the halftime of the 1916 Thanksgiving Day football game between Texas and archrival the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas (later Texas A&M University), a game in which Texas defeated the Aggies 22 - 7.[8] Following the game, Ben Dyer, editor of the UT campus magazine The Alcalde, referred to the mascot as BEVO.[9] It is not known why he chose this name, though various theories have been put forth, including that Texas A&M had a hand in naming the mascot.[9]
The best-known tale has been called into question.[9][10] The legend claims that the name came about due to an incident of vandalism led by students of the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas.[11][12][9] It is true that in 1917, four Texas A&M Aggies kidnapped the longhorn and branded him with "13 - 0", the score of A&M's 1915 win over Texas.[9][12][10] Texas students are rumored to have retaliated by changing the steer's brand to Bevo, as is sometimes claimed.[9][10] However, there is actually evidence that Bevo was fattened up and served at a football banquet in 1920, due to the fact the university did not have the money to take care of him and he was not tamed to roam the campus.[9][10] The Aggies were fed the side they had branded and presented with the hide, which still read 13–0.[9][10] Since Ben Dyer had used the term one year previously, this would mean that the A&M prank could not have led to the name.[9] Another story states that it is possible the editor had Bevo in mind, which was a near beer.[9]
Another potential source of the BEVO name was the one reported in The Daily Texan, the student newspaper of UT: "Through the 1900s and 1910s, newspapers ran a series of comic strips drawn by Gus Mager. The strips usually featured monkeys as the main characters, all named for their personality traits. Braggo the Monk constantly made empty boasts, Sherlocko the Monk was a bumbling detective, and so on. The comic strips were popular enough to create a nationwide fad for persons to nickname their friends the same way, with an 'o' added to the end. The Marx Brothers were so named by their colleagues in Vaudeville: Groucho was moody, Harpo played the harp, and Chico raised chicks when he was a boy. Mager's strips ran every Sunday in newspapers throughout Texas, including Austin. In addition, the term 'beeve' is the plural of beef, but is more commonly used as a slang term for a cow (or steer) that's destined to become food. The term is still used, though it was more common among the general public in the 1910s when Texas was more rural. The jump from 'beeve' to 'Bevo' isn't far, and makes more sense given the slang and national fads of the time."[9]
[end quote]
Both stories are quite good, and I'm most impressed by the inventiveness of the first and the sociohistorical research of the second.
I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did :)
