Anything...Everything

makokitten:

dudeufugly:

oh wow, I had no idea!

“In Arthur Conan Doyle’s first writing notes in making his soon-to-be-world-famous crime stories, the originally intended name of his detective was Sherringford Holmes and his assistant Ormond Sacker. But Doyle later found that the name were too obscure and awkward, so he changed them the assistant’s to John Watson because it accordingly dull, and his star Sherlock Holmes.”

• Some Sherlockians say Holmes’ real name was Sherringford Holmes and “Sherlock” was merely a nom — devised by Watson and/or Doyle — to hide his true identity.
• Others say Sherringford is his mother’s maiden name: Violet Sherringford. Doyle had a fondness for the name Violet, and in writing there are three four Violets in The Sacred Writings: Violet Smith, Violet Hunter, Violet de Merville, and Violet Westbury. All the Violets were exceptional women — strong willed and courgeous. It appeared that Holmes had a slight affection towards the name, many Sherlockians believe this may be due to a familiarity of the name Violet in course of a mother.
• And then another theory suggested that Holmes had a second brother, perhaps one older than Mycroft, was named Sherringford Holmes. According to Victorian law, the eldest son inherits the family estate from the father; since neither Mycroft nor Sherlock claimed it, the theory of the third brother aroused. x

Sherrin(g)ford:
The root for Sherring- can translated in two paths:

1. It could be another Angelicised version of the name Sherwin, coming from scir wynne, an Old English phrase meaning “bright friend.”

2. An eccentric version of feminine Sherri, which is the English phonetic spelling of the French word chèrie, meaning “dear.”

Ford derives from the name which is Old English for “river crossing,” something like a bridge. Or just simply “road/road crossing [over a river or stream].”Consequently, Sherringford could be “dear river crossing/bridge,” “bright friend of a river crossing/bridge,” “dear road [over a river/stream],” “bright friend of the road [over a river/stream].”

source also

Obscure Sherlock Holmes trivia for your morning!  In case you guys ever wondered where Seth and I pulled Sherrinford from.

EDIT: I tweaked the original post, though, because there are four Violets in the canon, not three.

oh-canada:

RIP Dr. Henry Morgentaler, who died today in Toronto at the age of 90.

Morgentaler is well known in Canada, both revered and hated, for crusading for access to safe and legal abortions. In 1988, the Supreme Court of Canada declared existing anti-abortion law unconstitutional, much in part to Morgentaler’s work as an activist for the cause.

An interesting passage from the Globe and Mail:

Dr. Morgentaler had a complex relationship with women all his life. As a child, he felt his mother didn’t love him as much as his younger brother; as a doctor, he performed thousands of safe, but illegal, abortions on desperate women with unwanted pregnancies; as a social and political activist, he worked to repeal Canada’s draconian abortion law in order to give women control over their reproductive lives; as a medical administrator, he opened eight clinics across the country to try to give women equality of access to abortions; and, as a man, he was a consummate philanderer who married three times and conducted many extramarital affairs. “He was a man who loved women and couldn’t be monogamous,” Catherine Dunphy wrote in her 1998 book, Morgentaler: A Difficult Hero.

Dr. Mortentaler was born and raised in Poland, and was imprisoned at Dachau for being Jewish during the Second World War. After surviving the Holocaust, he immigrated to the United States and finally to Canada in 1950. He attended the University of Montreal, where he received his medical education, and was one of the first Canadian doctors to perform vasectomies and to provide birth control pills to the unmarried.

He became a Member of the Order of Canada in  2008, “for his commitment to increased health care options for women, his determined efforts to influence Canadian public policy and his leadership in humanist and civil liberties organizations.”

RIP Dr. Morgentaler.