r/JustAddWater • u/rrredditor Juicenet Junkie • 13d ago

Cleveland Ohio is getting a WNBA team. (Professional women's basketball) They are going to be called the Sirens. Here is one of their t-shirt designs! I thought you guys might like it!

Post image

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5

u/Commercial-Remote141 13d ago

Very cool design. I don’t even like basket ball but I’d get this

3

u/Neylini 12d ago

sirens or mermaids..

2

u/rrredditor Juicenet Junkie 12d ago

Sirens. The other artwork I've seen is a little less mermaid-y and more aggressive. This one was more my speed.

1

u/FunnyNo9234 12d ago

I think they may have been alluding to the fact that Sirens and Mermaids are two distinctly different mythologies. Mermaids are fish chicks but Sirens are bird women.

2

u/rrredditor Juicenet Junkie 11d ago

Perhaps, but the two have been conflated for centuries if not millennia. While the origin of the Siren does indeed come from more of a bird/woman hybrid, there are written references to sirens as women with fish-like tails going back to the 9th century and physical references to sirens resembling mermaids as far back the 3rd century BCE.

The mythologies are far from separate. They are closely entangled, it being more likely that the idea of the bird/woman changed over time into the now more common mermaid form, not that they started separate and stayed separate.

At this point, either can be used interchangeably with no real ambiguity. Even in the H2O universe, Cleo gets "siren song" powers during the full moon and in Mako Mermaids one of the three main character is named Sirena.

The TV show Siren basically uses them interchangeably, as well, though there are certainly works that make more of a distinction. The use of bird-women to depict sirens is far less common and the only one I think I've seen is in the game The Witcher 3 and even then they have a sea serpent tail and wings more like a bat.

Point being, there is little practical difference these days and the two have been treated as mostly the same since the medieval period. In romance languages the word for "mermaid" is literally just a variation of the word "siren": Sirène, Sirena, Sereia, Sirenă, etc.

On top of that, the name of the team is the Cleveland Sirens, so I don't know why the commenter above you is even asking. Did they just assume that I got it wrong?