One of the people who poses a question to the Question Box moderator; teaches Political Science at St. Gertrude-by-the-Tarn. Asks if it is okay to use Marx's Communist Manifesto in her coursework [St. Fidgeta & Other Parodies, 45].
Translates to "little flower;' also the first name of New York's famous Mayor La Guardia.
Myers explains that the M used to be seen very often as the name of nuns. "In some orders they chose their own religious names, presumably for the saint whom they most wished to emulate and Mary the Mother of Christ was so far ahead of all the others that virtually every member of the order was sister Mary-Something-Or-Other. I think there may even have been other orders in which every nun, whether by custom or decree, took Mary as her first religious name. Because it was so common, it was conventionally abbreviated to 'Sister M. Whatever,' as you needed the Whatever to distinguish one nun from another."
Gertrude was a Benedictine nun and mystic (1256-1301) and is the Patroness of the West Indies.
Bowen notes that it was common for Catholic colleges to have both a saint and a location in their name, "including our alma mater, whose official name was Notre Dame du Lac ('Our Lady of the Lake')."
