**********Update*************
Exhultation! It's absolutely time to name the revolution, and yet it no longer matters what we call it, Mubarak is gone and Suleiman appears to be likely to be going soon. Hooray for these brave protestors!!
After most of a day of voting, it appears the popular choices are:
- Let the Egyptians give it a name (when they are ready).
- The Egyptian Revolution -- Duh!
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In general, we've had at least four broad categories of responses. For the poll, I've marked each possible respone with the following code to distinguish the apparently local names from the external media names, the facetious and so on.
- Serious discussions of the protestors' and local media's take on the issue. "The Revolution of Anger" and so on. These names are given the best place atop the list.
- What appear to be external media names. Note that I included the Al Jazeera name "Lotus Revolution", as it appears to be international media generated, not local protestor terminology. No intention to deprecate the name, which would be the one I'd vote for it I could vote.
- "Not a consumer product" / "This is their job" was, I suspect, the most common reaction at the first stage of this polling process. I rather think my own half-jest-full-serious treatment of the topic (comparing it to consumer product branding) may have repelled people, since the desire to help the Egyptian protestors is (I assume??) popular. I figure there should be at least two different expressions of this idea, as there seemed to be two different streams of thought on it.
- The humorous names, following my consumer products comments. I've gone ahead and left these in the poll. A bit of context: commentors made clear that these can mostly be regarded as extensions of type 3, that is, the "how rude of you to suggest we name the revolution" type remarks. In other words the commentors were, to the best of my knowledge, not in any way making fun of the protestors' valiant efforts! Rather, I believe that the commentators were objecting to my treatment of the protests as not being respectful enough. Please do not write and complain about the commentators' being disrespectful, their comments were that I was not respectful enough.
- The missing category tells us a lot about DKOS readers: no one suggested their own made up (and serious) name. When I started this project I asked for such names and assumed they would be the largest single group. But in fact, everyone wanted to provide only names they thought were used on the ground, in the media, or else protests at my even suggesting readers make up a name.
Note that I've biased the poll results by placing them in the order listed above. I assume that no one will mind this, as the poll compares not just apples and oranges but also durians and sardines. This poll makes NO claim to being scientific.
So, have at it.
Caveat: the quote marks in the poll questions are actually paraphrases and summaries, not true quotes. However, I didn't want to throw them out there like they were my words, I have enough trouble teaching my students not to plagiarize as it is.