Roddenberry's literary inspiration for Trek names

Here's an item of interest for people wondering where the names come  from for Star Trek characters.

It should be common knowledge that all of the character names in Classic Star Trek, including Spock, were stolen from the pages of the early, less widely known, works of Shakespeare.

New research indicates that previous drafts of Macbeth featured a Scottish king named Kirk who was murdered by the Thane of Cawdor, an enterprising man named MacCoy. also the working title of the play.

Toward the end of the play, Lady MacCoy throws a beggar out of the castle, crying, "Out, out, damn Spock!"  The pretender king, MacCoy, is killed in a brutal sword fight with a Scotsman called "Scotty." In later drafts, his name was changed to MacDuff.

We all (or many of us, at least) have heard about Jordi LaForge, the disabled Star Trek fan for whom Chief Engineer Geordi LaForge is named.  And many of us also have heard that Jean-Luc Picard is named, in part, after Jean Piccard, a French balloonist.  (There is also a Jean Picard, a French astronomer noted for calculating the size of the earth.) And of course Wesley was named after Roddenberry himself, whose given name was Wesley Eugene.

Well, here's something else to add to the trivia:

pulaski: a single-bit axe with an adze-shaped hoe extending from the back
(Courtesy of Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary)

I don't know if it's significant, but it struck me as interesting to find out that "pulaski" is actually a word and not just a name.

Add that to other useless name trivia about the origins of names like "Hikaru" (means the Shining One, see Vonda Mackintyre's "The Entropy Effect" for more info.), "Mr Atoz" ("A to Z," appropriate for a librarian) and N'gilam ("Malign" backwards).

Nyota Uhuru (or Uhura, depending on the transliteration) is Swahili for "Star Freedom."

Pavel Chekov was the name of Russian playwright Anton Chekhov's father.

I think — and this is mostly a guess — that the name of Leonard McCoy comes from a short story by Kafka called "Just a Plain Old Country Doctor."

That's all I can think of right now.