Named for or after? What is the difference between “named for George Washington” and “named after George Washington”? Nothing really, although the Brits seem to use “named after” exclusively.
Named for or after William Lawrence Sr Omnibit 3-12-20
Named for or after William Lawrence Sr Omnibit 3-12-20
Maybe it’s a bit of old Saxon idiom. The German equivalent phrase uses “nach”, which means “after”. “He was named for his grandfather” would be “Er wurde nach dem Grossvater benannt”.
I also wonder if we made a deliberate decision to use “for” in that idiom. In the early years of the Republic, there were deliberate efforts made by grammarians here in the new nation, to separate, or better, to distinguish the way we spoke and wrote English from the decadent style of the royalists we had recently defeated.
The Roman republic was an ideal to the Founders. And it reflected the republican ideal, to return Latin-derived words to their more original forms. For example, that’s why we dropped the “u” from words like “colour” and “honour.”
The same goes for our pronunciation of words ending in “-ary”, derived from the Latin ending, “-arius”. The British swallow the syllable-“diction-ry”, whereas we sound it out.
Noah Webster’s dictionary was compiled with such an object in mind.
Good stuff, Brad.