For me, it all started with Snickers.  Or, as I still call it Marathon.  Up until that point, I never realised that things could change their name.  It was 1990.  In some way that I couldn’t altogether define at the time, the world had changed.

Of course, it was diminutive pop superstar Prince who altered the naming-changing game for good.  In 1993, when he decided to no longer be called Prince in favour of an unpronounceable squiggle, the phrase ‘formerly known as’ became imbedded in our popular vocabulary.

The floodgates had been opened.  In the following decades, everything started to change its name from food products to banks to entertainment venues.  Opal Fruits became Starburst; Midland Bank became HSBC; the Millennium Dome became the O2.

The last couple of years have seen a particular burst of retitling activity: Meta Platforms is the technology conglomerate formerly known as Facebook Inc.; King Charles III is the Royal formerly known as Prince Charles; Fanta Pineapple and Grapefruit is the drink formerly known as Lilt; and, most recently, X is the social media network formerly known as Twitter.

Given his beef with Twitter, I can understand why Elon Musk may have wanted to put his own individual stamp on the company.  But X?  X Corp, OK; X Holdings, fine; SpaceX, perfectly acceptable.  But just X.  It seems a little… rudimentary.  Even given Musk’s apparent lifelong affinity with the letter, it still seems as though he is sacrificing all the benefits of a well-established brand for the sake of a personal idiosyncrasy.  I can’t imagine X ever existing in isolation without the additional caveat of ‘formerly known as Twitter’.

So, is there any example of something that is ‘formerly known as’, which has been an improvement on its predecessor?

I can think of only one; perhaps two, if I include Twigs. The name of football club Bolton Wanderers’ stadium had been the Reebok Stadium.  It then became the University of Bolton Stadium but, since 1 July 2023 it has been renamed the Toughsheet Community Stadium.  Classic.  Not a ‘formerly known as’ in sight.

© Simon Turner-Tree

ST-T formerly known as Simon Turner-Tree.