It's well known that “Enola Gay” was the pilot Tibbets's mother's name; according to Wikipedia, she, in turn, was named for a character in a novel her father had liked. They don't name the novel, but I assume it is Enola, or, Her Fatal Mistake (1886), by Mary Young Ridenbaugh, whose other book is a biography of her grandfather, Biography of Ephraim McDowell, M.D., “the Father of Ovariotomy”.

But who names his daughter after a character in a novel? And what sort of person names his aircraft after his mother?

Labels: Things Named After People

A term that doesn't exist in English yet: the erikative. It means a verb used by itself in an online post as a sort of stage direction to convey what the writer is doing, like “grins” or “shakes fist” or whatever. In German it usually has no personal ending (seufz = sigh, for example), so it was just waiting to be explained as a particular verbal category. It is named for Erika Fuchs.

Labels: Things Named After People