Lanstronauts, Lansingites, Lansing residents: What do we call ourselves?

LANSING — "What do we call Lansing residents?" may not carry as much emotional baggage as asking "Where does 'Up North' start?" and it's not even as troubling as "Are we Michiganders or Michiganians?" — but the answer to the first question may be changing in real time.

Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, currently the subject of vice presidential speculation , recently seemed to come out as a member of Team Lanstronaut.

The moniker, introduced by the Lansing MI Facts social media account , only arose up in recent years. The appellation saw its highest-profile use on Monday when Whitmer used the term in a social media Threads post announcing a U.S. Navy ship named after the city.

"Lansing is a weird, wonderful city. As a proud Lanstronaut, I couldn’t be more excited that Lansing will soon have its first-ever @USNavy ship named after it," Whitmer's post says.

You may add Lansing Mayor Andy Schor to the ranks of Lanstronauts in the wake of the ship announcement. The mayor, in his own post on X , credited LansingMIFacts: "A Lanstronaut shout-out means that @LansingMIFacts was there in spirit."

Scott Bean, spokesperson for the mayor, said Schor is happy to see "Lanstronauts" take off, but official mayoral and city business is typically done with the more staid "Lansing residents" term.

He said Whitmer, as possibly the first governor to hail from the Lansing region, gives the nickname an authentic boost.

Since there's a Team Lanstronaut, who else is playing for the hearts and nicknames of the Greater Lansing crowd?

There appears to be only two serious competitors: "Lansing residents," which is eminently practical and equally boring, and "Lansingites," which was in common use from the 1920s through the 1960s, according to a search of Lansing State Journal archives.

"Lansingites" dramatically dropped in popularity in subsequent decades and has been used only two dozen times in the 2020s in the Lansing State Journal. The last usage was around two years ago.

The launch of the Lanstronauts

The Lanstronaut name makes absolutely no sense because Lansing is a car city, not a space city, said Ty Forquer, who jointly oversees the LansingMIFacts social media account.

"I coined the word, as far as I know," he said.

The first use that he knows of was in a 2019 post on Twitter. Stickers arrived in early 2020, featuring an image of a freshly redesigned CATA bus as a spaceship with futuristic type face saying: "Lanstronaut To Frandor and Beyond" over an image of a globe.

Forquer said he invented the name because the social media account, which he administers along with Craig Terrill, needed a catchier word to call Lansing residents, and existing options like Lansingite and Lansinger weren't working.

"I don't know if you'd call it ironic, but we're such a car culture city so we'll call ourselves this," Forquer said. "One of the things we really love about Lansing is it's a very blue-collar city mashed up against a world-class university and the capitol, and if you go 30 minutes in any direction, you're in complete farmland. It's socially, economically and racially diverse."

He said after the governor used the Lanstronauts name on Monday, he got messages from all over.

"I didn't know what was happening. Did someone hit the (Pennsylvania Avenue) bridge again or kidnap the (Meijer) giraffe?" Forquer wondered.

He said city officials have increasingly used the word in informal settings, like on social media or in conversations, but he doesn't expect to ever see official proclamations using "Lanstronauts" to describe city residents.

What about other names?

Dipping into the Lansing State Journal archives as well as pivoting off of the typical nicknames, we can look for names like Lansingian, Lansinger and Lansingander.

Only Lansinger, often stylized as LanSinger, has a history in the State Journal's pages, as recorded by Newspapers.com.

A radio yodeler in the 1920s made a splash out of Lansing and appeared on national radio programs. His identity was hidden and he was known only as the United LanSinger. Lansing Community College has occasionally fielded a choir or a chorus with the name of LanSingers.

There are no references in the State Journal to Lansingian or Lansingander, which are based on the most common demonyms for Michigan residents: Michiganian and Michigander .

Contact Mike Ellis at mellis@lsj.com or 517-267-0415

This article originally appeared on Lansing State Journal: Lanstronauts, Lansingites, Lansing residents: What do we call ourselves?