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The naming of names. . .

Busy week here in Sherlock Peoria. After squirrels nibbled away just enough cable to kill our internet connection (and the Oxygen network, but none of our other cable channels), it took a few days to get our internet connection back and update the site. There was also some last minute planning of our local scion picnic, which you may hear more of next week. And last, but especially not least, the choosing of a name for that developing Canonical character club mentioned earlier on this page.

Naming a Sherlock Holmes society is usually a pretty simple matter, and a fun one. You go to The Complete Sherlock Holmes, and look for colorful phrases, titles, or characters that appeal to you for one reason or another. (It also helps to get a list of all known societies, as can be found on the web -- going to the ever-useful www.sherlockian.net makes this easy -- so you don’t duplicate a group already out there.) Then you get the rest of the society to go along with whatever name you’ve come up with.

As the idea of a Canonical character role-playing society is something a bit different, however, the usual technique really wouldn’t work. After all, why would Canonical characters belong to a society named after one of their own number or a tale one of them was in. The name has to work both within the framework of the role-play, and outside of it. These thoughts, of course, are complete hindsight on my part. What we basically did was have everyone who wanted to be in the group submit their suggestions as to what we could name it. The list we came up with was fairly diverse:

"From time to time" -- SCAN
A Singular Set of People
The Athenaeum Club
The Post-Holmes Reinvestigation Society
The Bagatelle Card Club
V.I.S.A. (Virtual Interactive Sherlockian Association)
Sherlockian Players of the Game
The Inter-Canon Social Club
V.I.C.T.O.R.I.A.N. (Virtually Interactive Company To Objectify Roles – Internet Action Network)
The Game’s Afoot – a Sherlockian Role-playing Scion
L.O.R.E (Loyal Order of Re-enactive Enthusiasts)
This Agency
The World is a Sherlockian Stage
Sherlock’s Stage Players
S.H.E.R.L.O.C.K. (Sherlock Holmes Environment – Roleplaying for Learning and the Objectification of Canonical Knowledge)
The Strand Celebrity Cotillion
B.S.I. (Baker Street Incognito)
The Realm of Sherlock, 1895
The League of Personality
D.P.S. (Dramatis Personae Sherlockiana)
Dark Lantern Society ("Illuminating Clients, Crooks, and other Canonical Characters)
The Patient Residents of the Adventures

From that list, all the interested parties began voting, and it wasn’t long before an obvious favorite came to the fore: The Dark Lantern Society, suggested by Joan Moore.

It’s a great name, and we all pretty much loved it . . . but then I started doing web searches. Though one never hears the term these days (none of us certainly had), "dark lantern societies," it seems, did exist in 1800s America. There isn’t a lot of information on them out on the web, but what references there were definitely didn’t put them in a positive light (the pre-Civil War pro-slavery not-positive kind of light). Having a club composed of denizens of the 1800s, where historical research was to be encouraged, it seemed a lot like "Dark Lantern Society" could come back to haunt us.

I explained this to the members, and Joan was quick to come back with a solution: "The Dark Lantern League." As it evokes "The Red-headed League," a Holmes story with one of the more well-known uses of dark lanterns, it seemed a natural. The name was put to the membership for another round of approval, and quickly met with agreement. The Dark Lantern League, it is.

More details on the club will be forthcoming, as now that we have settled on a name, the real fun can begin.

Your humble correspondent,
Brad Keefauver